Uniqlo does it again with Lucky Counter campaign. The fashion retailer asks people to promote their favorite Uniqlo items via Twitter against price reduction for the said item of – estimating from my experience – 0,01% per tweet.
That’s a pretty nifty twist on the retweet-to-win or retweet-for-a-discount campaign.
Clever and new is welcome. But fundamentally, this is another campaign that relies on people using their activity streams to send someone else’s commercial message. And while that may have some value to some of their followers, to most it will just be an annoyance.
I’m not naive enough to think that retweeting promotions are going away any time soon. The barrier to participation is so low and the incentive for marketers is so strong that we’ll see plenty more.
What I do hope for is this: that enough marketers will also see an opportunity for more meaningful interaction that they’ll devise more conversational promotions – the kind that lead people to lend their voices, and not just their audiences, to a campaign.
I agree with your points, however, feel that the annoyance of the actual tweeting part that you talk about was easily overcome by the short time that the campaign was running, it wasn’t infesting Twitter feeds for long enough for people to become tiresome of it. I believe this to be a very clever little campaign from UNIQLO with purpose delving way beyond expanding the brands social media presence, covering the brand necessity of consumer interaction whilst the website was ‘under construction’ and ensuring a large number of visitors to the website on the day of launch. The campign is highly reflective of the brands simplistic style in men’s and women’s clothing as well as their overall image.
Hi, Holly – Thanks for the comment. But I’m reluctant to trust brands (or their ambassadors) to decide when marketing communications are becoming tiresome. Frankly, I don’t think most of them care that much; for many, “tiresome” is synonymous with “sufficiently repetitive to work effectively”.
Were you involved in the campaign? I ask because I couldn’t help but notice you managed to get the keywords “women’s clothing” in the anchor text for a link to Uniqlo. And that you seem to do that or something similar in several of your comments around the web regarding Uniqlo.