Trending #1 on Black Friday within 6 minutes

The Challenge

With a relatively small budget, Campfire was challenged to create an online social campaign that would trend and raise awareness for the Missguided brand and its seasonal/Black Friday sale.

The issue was obvious, every single digital retailer clambering on top of one another, pushing promotions every single hour, on every single platform; we needed to find a way to win in this arena with a budget that simply didn’t allow us to compete in a conventional way. The aim was to find a way for the Missguided brand to firstly attract and entice consumers to the brand amongst the noise, giving them a positive and stimulating experience that exceeded that of generic competitor campaigns.

Client Ideas

Initial ideas from the client involved wanting to go toe-to-toe with the competition on Black Friday by getting Missguided in front of consumers amongst all the other online fashion brands who were simultaneously using social media to promote their sales through similar tactics and messaging. Whichever way possible, Missguided wanted to be noticed first and wanted to provide a positive experience amongst the Black Friday madness.

Initial Thought Process

Campfire needed a spark of creativity with the way in which we were going to get Missguided centre stage on Black Friday. Typical Black Friday communications involves somewhat of a ‘shouting match’ between huge online clothing competitors - but our extensive analysis showed that instead of shouting the loudest, Campfire should aim to drown out the competition with a constant stream of clever and intriguing brand communication. This communication would point the eager Black Friday participant away from the generic brash onslaught of discounts, to clever concise and creative whispering of what Missguided had to say.

So how would we create a stunning campaign that immediately intrigued and stimulated users? Using a platform that would enable constant interaction and communication

throughout the day seemed like a perfect place to start - we required a platform that had its own organic sharing mechanic that would allow the communications to spread far and wide organically also.

Strategy

Our goal therefore was to get Missguided trending in the UK on the Twitter platform for Black Friday, and not just for an hour or so, but all day long.

To achieve this goal, we wanted to give consumers the opportunity to actually have fun, relax and enjoy themselves, rather than be bombarded with maddening generic Black Friday sales messaging, as well as have constant interaction with the brand on the platform.

Before the boom of quizzes in lockdown in 2020, Campfire trusted that using a quiz as a promotional mechanic would stimulate individuals to get involved in the Missguided Black Friday campaign. This felt like the easiest and most familiar way to gamify and intrigue users, whilst simultaneously opening an opportunity for 24 hour communication between brand and consumer without this becoming tedious or overly complicated.

The #MakeMyFriday Quiz would involve questions every 15 minutes relating to popular culture trivia including a range of movie and TV based questions from ‘Who was the leading man in Titanic?’ to ‘What colour are Mickey Mouse's shorts?’.

Questions were tailored to a more female centric audience as this was the target demographic for Missguided, the more these consumers felt like they knew the answer, the more likely they were to participate (give an answer) and open up communication with the Missguided brand.

Campfire paid immense attention to striking the balance between the challenge of the questions and range/level of knowledge required to answer them, as this was vital in getting individuals to participate without becoming too bored (ease) or frustrated (hard) maintaining constant participation throughout the day.

Twitter became the ideal platform for the quiz for a number of key reasons - information/news sharing, conversation based and a fast paced platform. Twitter offered Missguided the opportunity to constantly stay in contact with users and monitor their responses easily and efficiently, in a way that was already natural and instinctive on the platform; something that would have been hard to execute on a more visual platform such as Instagram or on a slower, more personal platform such as Facebook. The velocity at which Missguided could tweet a question and this could be seen by more and more potential customers was incredibly high, giving the brand a lot of early attention when first beginning to trend.

Campfire also partnered with Blue Robot who were able to provide an ingenious tweet mechanic: A Tweet that, when liked, enabled us to send a direct notification to that user, which when put into practice, allowed us to send over 10,000 direct reminders as soon as the Missguided #MakeMyFriday Quiz began. Immediate participation was necessary to the popularity of the quiz on the platform, and the use of the reminder mechanic is what allowed over 4000 people to take part immediately, getting #MakeMyFriday to trending number 1 in the UK in under 7 minutes.

Often the prizes developed for social media competitions are quite small and mildly attractive to consumers. Campfire wanted to reinvent social media prize giving by investing a large proportion of the budget in prizes people wanted, badly. These included a choice of designer luggage, £1000 in cash, a trip for two to see the northern lights and a romantic trip for two in New York City.

Once people realised the ease of answering the questions within the quiz, the trending popularity of the quiz and the social and time costs to enter reduced significantly, the incredible prizes tipped the odds for participation heavily in Missguided’s favour. The results speak for themselves...

Missguided Trended Number 1 in the UK within 6 minutes of the quiz starting, and maintaining a top spot throughout Black Friday. The brand also trended Globally within an hour of the quiz starting and maintained this spot for an entire afternoon. Overall 10,832,838 users were reached by the quiz and its participation - 130,000 entries/answers. This created a viral storm for Missguided, cutting above other direct competitor messaging significantly.