Multiple Brands Joining Hands To Promote Social Media Campaigns

Social media is evolving with every passing day as experiments are coming about quite often. Even though the supporters of experimentation form a small portion in India, changes are happening. Initially there was a fear to go social by a large chunk of business but today there are more brands willing to increase their budgets. We’ve come a long way – from campaigns being run in silos to big budget integrated ones.

And not only big budget ones, we have also seen how brands are smartly using individual networks with lesser cost and achieving the targets. Myntra’s campaigns on Twitter such as #ReplaceMovieTitlesWithSale, #bachpanstyle and the recent Lakmé Salon ‘My Best Friend’s Bachelorette Party‘ Pinterest campaign serve as good examples. With all these, there has been a recent trend of brands designing campaigns in association with other brands. In other words multiple brands are associating for a campaign and promoting it jointly.

Brands encouraging the trend

The trend of multiple brands supporting and promoting a campaign started featuring with the rise of 2013. The first one we noticed was recently during the promotions of the Grammys. The English entertainment channel VH1 and the coffee brand Nescafe came together for the “Ticket 2 Ride” campaign. Fans would be led to a microsite from Facebook where they had to answer few questions and lucky winners could get a chance to be at the Grammys in LA to witness the award function. Both the brands were promoting the campaign on their individual networks along with acknowledge the partner brands too.

During the same time, we also witnessed Colgate Max Fresh from the house of Colgate-Palmolive and MTV partnering to hunt and mentor the fresh talents in India. And the first initiative in this venture is the ‘Are U Fresh Enuf’ campaign that encourages the singing talents of the country to submit a piece of their talent, and get a chance to be part of a workshop with Music Director Amit Trivedi.

Both the brands promoted the campaign on their social networks and tried achieving a bigger reach.

Challenges and road ahead for this growing trend

I am bullish about this trend that has picked up with the beginning of 2013. However, along with the positive such as bigger reach for the campaigns; brand associations will work effectively only when there has been sync up between both the brands and also the social presence is integrated well.

The “Ticket 2 Ride” campaign witnessed similar problems where it was noticed that the Nescafe’s Twitter team was not even aware of the campaign and had zero promotions for the same. However, VH1 India was promoting the campaign aggressively and driving fans to the Nescafé Facebook Page.

Nevertheless, this is a strategy that we have all seen working in the traditional marketing business. So it is interesting to see how brands are implementing the same strategies online but keeping the social behaviour of fans in mind. We are going to see more brands joining the bandwagon as we move ahead in 2013.

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