Fat Face, Campervans and business objectives

by Mark P. Filed under: Case studies

“…the number of people interacting online was incredible and the resulting database almost ten times larger because of this…” – Ali Shears, Direct Marketing Manager at Fat Face.

To say we were pleased with the result is an understatement.

When Fat Face told us that they wanted to give away a VW Campervan we knew that we had to come up with something awesome to make sure that as many people as possible would get a chance to win it.

The objective was to increase the size of the mailing list, the offline mailing list and as a secondary objective, to build brand awareness.

We came up with a very simple online mechanism. Basically a prize draw – with a twist.

The landing page (click to view larger)

A user visited the site that we created, entered their details and they were then given their own page to share with their friends. Every friend that entered the competition gave the user three more chances to win.

We then encouraged the user to share their page in as many places as possible with Twitter, Facebook, email sharing and various social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Stumbleupon and Google Bookmarks.

The sharing page (click to view larger)

The Quote…

Here’s a full quote from Alison Shears, direct marketing manager at Fat Face,

“To increase awareness of the competition we wanted to implement the Media Genius’ competition application.  The ease of sharing information via social networks combined with the referral mechanic really drove the viral element of this – making it the biggest in Fat Face history.

The competition was great for brand awareness – the number of people interacting online was incredible and the resulting database almost ten times larger because of this.  Data capture enabled us to see the demographics of those entering, generating useful information for future marketing.  It was also great to see the volume of people who opted in for Fat Face information.  Obviously the incentive was well aligned with our brand!

It was amazing watching the buzz our campaign generated across social networks like Twitter and Facebook.  It’s easy to use with everything in one place making it simple to pull out all the information you need to evaluate campaigns.”

Eyeballs everywhere

Interestingly we noticed that even though email was used over three times as much for sharing; Facebook by far sent the most traffic. The average share ratio on Facebook is one to one hundred and fifty, whereas email is only one to one. That’s a lot of pairs of eyes looking at the brand and a lot of potential people that we can get to engage with it. Twitter has an even higher ratio but still has nowhere near the momentum of Facebook in everyday culture.

Evangelists replace street teams

Once the users were engaged, we were amazed at the lengths some of them would go to market their page. One enterprising entrant had over two thousand entries, this person had become an evangelist of great value to the Fat Face brand. Not so long ago we’d have paid a lot of money to so called “street teams” to do this for us, basically hiring key influencers and enabling brute force awareness creation in blogs and forums…

Peer to peer marketing

An unexpected, yet fascinating and incredibly powerful engagement observation was the way the entrants would modify the message that they were sending to their friends. The default message “Check out the Fat Face – WIN a classic VW camper at winacamper.fatface.com” started to become targeted with language that their peers would respond to. Entrants were starting to become a peer to peer marketing machine, tailoring the message for their own purpose. This totally blew us away and we will being exploring this in further campaigns…

Increasing the Fan Base

Every user that opted in had their details directly imported into Fat Face’s mailing list manager via its API. I can’t tell you the numbers, but, I can tell you that they already had a good sized list and it was increased by over one thousand percent… The take up for receiving the “snail mail” catalogue was also astounding, this is as much a testament to Fat Face’s very loyal initial fanbase.

This campaign used Simpleweb’s Media Genius set of tools for social monitoring and the actual prize draw application itself. Please contact us to see if we can help you.

  • http://www.simpleweb.co.uk/index.php/2010/02/the-four-pillars-of-a-successful-online-campaign-social-or-otherwise/ The Four Pillars of a successful online campaign – Social or otherwise… — Simpleweb

    [...] the Autumn of 2009 Simpleweb did an online marketing campaign for Fat Face (the high street retailer). It was their most successful campaign ever, increasing [...]

  • http://twitter.com/brandrsn Brian

    Found this via LinkedIn Mark, very nice case-study. Well Done.

  • admin

    Thanks Brian.

  • Toni Massari

    Alas! I have owned two of the little beauties – though none were ‘splitties’. It meant a vertiginously steep learning curve and I bought about 3 VW Camper manuals – including the indispensible “How to keep your VW camper alive”
    The tatty 1973 model had belonged to BT and leaked oil. I had to learnto adjust the timing at the traffic lights, using a ‘timing light’ – a fancy name for a lightbulb and two wires. Thank be the VW gods for the manual’s suggestion that I marks the spot at 5 degrees ATDC (After Top Dead Centre) with a pin dipped in white enamel paint! BTW it *could* be you need 5 BTDC… depends on when your engine was built!

    Eventually the novelty of this wore off and I invested some £1200 in a recon’d engine, I think it came from VWee, in the Nertherlands.
    Several breakdowns later (mechanical and nervous ones!) I had it more or less running sweet.

    Then a colleague at Uni needed £1000 for his Uni fees, and I used my savings to buy his 1968 Camper, with a buy-back option if he could come up with the cash in 3-6 months.
    It wasn’t a splitty, but the interior was pukka! I almost creied when I sold it, for the same cash I paid for it and having spent a couple of months fixing everything that needed sprucing up.

    What’s worse is that the wally got himself a final grade of ZERO for plagiarism, and so did his g/f, though it wasn’t even her fault!

    Goes to show: campers are lovely and so are relationships, but in the end both can leave you with a hole in your pocket and a sour taste. I still love campers though, but I have given up driving ‘cos I’d rather walk or cycle and keep my carbon footprint in check.

    Nice one though! BTW, what do you suggest for a network for a bunch of volunteers? I need them to have Forum, Blog, Events calendar and to be private. Ning are phasing out free networks.

    Cheers!

  • admin

    Toni, campers and relationships are both lovely, if kept separate… ;)

    I reckon that these days WordPress is the way to go… you can do all kinds of cool stuff with it now. i think you might even be able to squeeze some kind of forum out of it. Have a look at Buddypress, although WordPress 3 is looking pretty cool…