** Part 5 of an 8-part Bentley Motors Campaign Plan**
–Objective two: To increase Bentley vehicle video sharing and feedback 120% by June 2012 at a cost of $400,000.
1) Launch a user-generated video contest for aspiring owners to describe, in three minutes or less, the Bentley brand and the status vehicle ownership would bring to their lives. The winner would receive a brand new Bentley Continental GT for a month. The contest would run from April to May 2012. The restrictions include: no profanity or violence, three-minute maximum and single-camera production. Those who submit videos would receive votes on a specially-designed contest website and the winners after one month win the grand prize. The top five videos get the car for a month while the five runners-up get VIP passes to the 2012 Concours D’Elegance show at Pebble Beach in California. This tactic encourages the primary target audience to share their submissions with friends, vote on the Bentley website and comment on videos. Essentially, the only costs for Bentley are the prizes.
2) Designate a team of three people to operate Bentley’s social networking profiles and engage with both secondary audiences via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other networks. With targeted engagement, Bentley can reach out to its audience that spends hours each day on social networks. This is a great opportunity for Bentley to become a thought-leader in the niche of vehicle technology and luxury manufacturing. From the Twitter account, Bentley can share its latest activity, answer customer questions publicly, share interesting bits of information about what goes into building a Bentley, educate consumers about auto industry trends and communicate its history as a brand. From its YouTube account, Bentley can make brief videos with exclusive interviews with upper-management and engineers. From its Facebook page, the brand can hold minor contests and help cultivate the brand’s image through testimonials, etc. The only cost to Bentley is staffing the community management team, yet the digital engagement rewards are vast.
3) Launch the event: “Build a Bentley Challenge.” Students from the leading engineering programs across the U.S. will compete to design a new Bentley to current luxury, safety and design expectations in two weeks. Bentley Motors would fly five teams of ten students from Stevens College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Georgia Institute of Technology and UC Berkeley (US News, 2011). For two weeks, these teams would learn how Bentley engineers design and build the models. Then, the two-week contest would begin to build the next great Bentley model. Winners would receive $200,000 in funding for their engineering program. All expenses would be paid for the participants. By recording the contest and offering video logs online to the public, Bentley would receive great publicity and the videos would circulate quickly. Though this initiative wouldn’t come cheap, Bentley would receive attention from its primary and secondary audiences through digital interaction and publicity. The span of the event would be February 1st to March 1st 2012.
**What Does Bentley’s Social Media Need To Drive Engagement?**
Sources:
“Top Engineering Schools In The U.S.” US News. 2011. Web. 5 Dec. 2011. <http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-engineering-schools/eng-rankings>.