Prospective Case Study: A Digital Strategy for the Swatch Group, from Social Polls to WeChat in China

What digital strategy could the Swatch Group use in China and on social media? In this prospective case study, written in 2017, QPSoftware designed a social polling campaign: polls on Facebook and Twitter, hashtag voting contests on Instagram and a survey tool on its WeChat Official Account. It is a concept, not a project delivered for the brand.

Key takeaways

• This prospective case study is a concept written by QPSoftware in 2017, not a campaign carried out for the Swatch Group.
• The idea: let followers vote for their favorite Santa watch design through social polls.
• Facebook and Twitter polls and Instagram hashtag contests would collect votes on global social networks.
• On WeChat, a survey tool connected to the Official Account of Swatch would add push messages, a results dashboard and lucky draws.
• Five campaign visuals and a short video storyboard support the #SWATCHYOURSANTA slogan.

This article presents both companies, to give a better idea of their business, then the need and the approach, and finally the solutions and designs imagined by QPSoftware’s team. Let’s dig into this prospective case study.

About QPSoftware

Built on a philosophy of talented people and great results, QPSoftware is a results-driven digital agency based in Shanghai, founded in 2009, that designs websites, builds WeChat solutions and mobile apps, and runs digital marketing projects. As a WeChat agency that builds for foreign brands, it designs and develops WeChat Mini Programs, WeChat stores and WeChat web apps.

Its mission has always been to create websites and digital solutions that help clients grow their business online. The QPSoftware difference is built on relationships with measurable results, as the team takes pride in nurturing authentic connections between its clients and their intended audience.

QPSoftware has delivered more than 200 projects, for brands such as LVMH Watches & Jewelry, Air France KLM and Schneider Electric.

About the Swatch Group

The Swatch Group is a diversified multinational holding company active in the manufacture and sale of finished watches, jewelry, watch movements and components. When this study was written in 2017, it presented itself as the world’s largest watchmaking group, with eighteen brands and its own multi-brand retail companies. Today, its website describes it as the number one manufacturer of finished watches in the world, with 16 watch brands.

In this exercise, the brief is a social media campaign that includes social polls and surveys, with visual content that grabs the brand’s audience, to deliver a more engaging social experience with useful analytics.

Needs Identification and Project Approach

To understand which social media channels are the most effective for reaching the market segment of Swatch, and to include polls and surveys in its social media strategy, you first need to explore how its audience uses social media.

Indeed, the networks that evolve on social media platforms like Facebook, WeChat, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and others might include the very audiences Swatch serves as a business.

But for this specific case, let’s focus on polls and surveys. They are some of the most powerful tools brands like Swatch can incorporate into their social strategy.

An effective social campaign should include different ways to interact with the customers and prospects of Swatch, such as engaging its user base, which has already shown its interest by liking or following the pages of Swatch on its social channels.

Social polling and online surveys would give the followers of Swatch the opportunity to get involved, and give the Swiss brand feedback on existing products or planned product releases.

To put it simply, social polling and online surveys improve:

• Community building
• Content generation
• Traffic
• A deep understanding of the followers and customers of Swatch

The platform features and follower counts in the next sections date from 2017, when this study was written.

Facebook

In 2017, Facebook enabled brands to create and post opinion polls, so that they could effectively collect and monitor the social feedback of their followers.

Twitter

Swatch could take advantage of Twitter polls, which give brands a unique opportunity to find out what their audience likes by simply asking, and on a mass level, since Swatch had more than 43,000 Twitter followers at the time.

Twitter polls would not only help Swatch conduct market research by collecting data and sentiment from its audience, but also involve its audience in the decision-making process, by asking which Santa watch they would like the Swiss watchmaker to produce.

Instagram

Given the growth of Instagram and the number of followers Swatch had on the platform (more than 700,000 at the time), designing and hosting an Instagram voting contest to engage with the brand’s audience was crucial.

Since the app had no built-in polling or survey tool at the time, and since Instagram is built on hashtags, Swatch could use a combination of hashtags, likes and votes to create regular contests for users.

Swatch could ask its audience to like the posted pictures or videos and to comment with the hashtags associated with the products the brand wants feedback on. Voting contests based on hashtags are a perfect way to tap into the viral nature of social media. Hashtags on Instagram work like keywords for SEO: the hashtags with the most engagement bring in the most traffic.

WeChat

In 2017, WeChat was the most active social media platform in China, with 900 million active users. It is an indispensable tool, with a wide range of commercial functions that companies use for all kinds of business transactions.

Within this context, and since Swatch already had an Official Account, the concept of QPSoftware was to use the WeChat API to add survey functions to the account, synchronized with the brand’s public WeChat account so that the tool could draw data from it. This would make creating WeChat surveys easy and efficient.

Using this API, the account of Swatch could send push notifications to users once they had taken the WeChat survey, and easily keep track of the results.

On the back end, a comprehensive dashboard would show the evolution of the results over time and make sense of the data received. The platform would also let the brand organize lucky draws, encouraging users to participate, interact and follow its WeChat account.

QPSoftware believed this was the best choice for companies such as Swatch that need an efficient solution with good design and comprehensive data analysis.

What Could QPSoftware Do to Help?

Design

It is hard to imagine a time when red and green were not synonymous with Christmas, but they have not always been the holiday’s go-to colors.

With a non-traditional Santa Claus in town, the designers of QPSoftware looked into bright, punchy and vintage colors for this project. They used many colors at once, but kept the scheme cohesive and logical, with a warm and fun consistency.

The social sentiment around Swatch was positive at the time, and the brand identity is perceived as young and fun. Therefore, the designers combined colors with a high contrast against each other, for a clean effect and a very welcoming palette. The same team designs marketing collateral for print and screens, from campaign visuals to brochures.

The #SWATCHYOURSANTA hashtag was chosen as the main campaign slogan, because it matches the featured products and resonates with the targeted audience and the brand identity.

Video

With video advertising quickly becoming one of the most effective ways to reach captive audiences, especially on dynamic platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and WeChat, the design team decided to follow the mobile video consumption trend and to engage the audience of Swatch with a short frame-by-frame video.

As viewers’ attention span is short, QPSoftware strongly recommends short videos, under 2 minutes, with engaging graphic overlays.

The inspiration for the video came from “Technologic”, the single released by the French duo Daft Punk in 2005, in which an electronically transposed voice chants a series of commands for technology.

The team selected its own words carefully, to match the featured Santa watches of Swatch, such as:

Each of the selected words represents a different part of the featured product and of the voting process.

Each of these words can also be used as an engaging hashtag throughout the whole social polling campaign, together with the bits of video associated with them.

Indeed, the video can be cut and exported into short GIFs, to further enhance engagement with the visual content and its reach.

What Is Your Next Step?

As you can see, the brief of this prospective case study was to find out which product would be the most popular to sell for the coming Christmas. The main idea of the concept of QPSoftware was to use the polls and surveys that each social media platform could offer, since Swatch had a huge number of followers on all of them and needed to capitalize on it. Information is power, so use it wisely!

If you need help launching this kind of project in China, or any other digital marketing project, our WeChat agency in Shanghai will be glad to help you: email [email protected] or contact the QPSoftware team.

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