Amara Raja the company which owns the Amaron Battery brand has announced the launch of an online contest for the brand. The contest is to promote the Amaron Pro Racing Team and wants participants to design of the team outfits, Pit stop, Rotax Karts & Cars for the racing team. The winners will travel for any of the Rotax or Formula racing series in India and spend a day with Amaron Racing Team at the race tracks.
The campaign which I suspect is called Funk my Ride (not quite sure if it is the official name for the campaign) is launched with a microsite at http://amaron.in/funkmyride, the contest officially began on the 8th of June. Besides the microsite users can also connect with the Amaron Team and the contest in general through the likes of FACEBOOK/ ORKUT and sport-specific sites like team-bhp.com, isport.
According to their release, to participate in the contest however, everyone needs to go sign up at the microsite mentioned above and take the following steps:
1. Register and choose the category of designs you would like to enroll for.
2. Download your canvas
3. Submit the completed creatives to the given email id or send through the snail mail.
Like mentioned before the category of designs range from the car to the team gears. Winners basically get to be part of the team on race besides the Amaron guys wearing one’s winning design of course. The contest will actually end pretty soon, in fact the last date for submission of your designs is on the 21st (their website however says till the 20th..so someone needs to confirm this) of this month while the results of the contest would be announced on the 23rd.
The interesting part of this announcement was also how Amaron is looking at Social Media in this campaign. Amaron Pro Racing Head – Motor Sport Mackinlay Barreto said, “We recognize the growing importance of engaging our customers in the communities where they hang out online—that’s increasingly on sites like Facebook, Orkut. We’re looking forward to checking out some cool art soon and selecting the design winners.”
What do you think?
Is this campaign suitable to promote Amaron’s brand online especially on Social Networks? Will it have the desired virality?
Personally I think it will, provided how excited people are about participating in this contest. Now I know that’s a very obvious line, but my thought was on the point of virality, that this contests has all the elements that can push virality and thereby brand awareness for the racing team and motorsports in India.
This is because designs created can be shared as photos in networking profiles, and most people tend to show their creative streak online through such resources – I am sure many of you might have added photos to your album simply to show your photography skills, likewise for designing. And with the inherent virality of these networks especially Orkut and Facebook where these actions are shown to one’s friend circle or say joining a fan page or group is highlighted a lot more people come to know other than the designing enthusiasts, which I think is the ulterior objective of the campaign.
