Case Study: Maruti Suzuki Ritz

Maruti Suzuki Ritz’s “Live the Moment” campaign (on air since December 2010) tries to strengthen the positioning as the car with the right balance. Just like its target group (the young and upwardly mobile) desires to have the right balance of purpose and fun, Ritz stands for the right combination of space, mileage and style. Among the most innovative auto brands on social media, Ritz, for the first time in India, announced to give out a brand new car as a prize. Maruti Suzuki’s objectives of this campaign are both to increase the impact of Brand Ritz as well as making profits.

About the Ritz "Live the Moment" Contest
Maruti Suzuki kicked off the contest by creating a microsite (http://livethemoment.ritzbymaruti.com/), inviting users to submit entries for the “Live the Moment” campaign.  To participate in the contest, the users had to share a story or moment that would attract their social network to vote for them. The entries were to be in the form of a text message along with an image and/or video, thereby making each entry a piece of shareable content.

Ritz on Facebook

The Facebook account of Ritz (www.facebook.com/ritzbymaruti) has more than 1.5 lakh fans who have uploaded over 1,400 photographs of their cars. With a secondary reach of more than 18 million FB users, the Ritz fan page is the fourth largest auto Facebook page in India. The page attracts a whopping 1,12,000 active monthly users, accounting for a post every 5 minutes, each enjoying 30,000 impressions on an average.

Constant moderation, along with engaging both prospective and existing customers by listening to them and answering their queries, keeps up the pace of user activity. Around 70 discussions and 170 user-generated posts have been managed to create the ‘community’ experience.

Micro-Engagement: The Key to Ritz’s Social Media Success

Answering each and every query in a personalized way, Ritz has been able to strike the chord with its audience. The Admin personally replies to all posts on the Ritz FB wall. With more than 3,500 followers on Twitter, micro-engagement through updates, retweets, replies and direct messages has become the best way to receive suggestions from users. A lot of followers on Twitter have been persuaded to join the Ritz fan page on Facebook.

  

Keeping it Simple

Registration is the last thing users want to do online. So, the challenge that Ritz had to face was making the whole process so simple and quick that it would encourage participation from users who wanted to share their moments. The micro-site for the contest was optimized and designed in a way that visitors could instantly enjoy the experience. Social media supported the successful execution of this vision. Says Pallavi Khare, Brand Manager (Ritz) at Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, “Users do participate if you make the mechanics simple and use the latest technology to enable social integration and create a seamless experience.”

An email connect, along with a social media connect, was integrated into the promo site. Then, the functionality further simplified user experience by enabling users to log in from any of the social media or email platforms they want to, submit entries and share their posts on any social media channel. At the same time, the application allowed a user to use Facebook, email or Twitter to connect the entry submission with their personal profile and appeal to his/her social network for votes.

The campaign has also been running on other social media platforms like YouTube, Flickr and Orkut. Ritz also has a large YouTube following with over 14,500 views so far on the official You Tube channel of Ritz which is www.youtube.com/marutiritz. The “Live the Moment” contest now has a bank of about 50,000 moments, constituting an online property that is integral to the personality of Brand Ritz.