What a charming campaign

The charms allow the bracelets to represent more than jewellery, as they become a collection of unforgettable moments that are truly dear to the wearer. There were already a lot of women talking about the brand on social media, but with so many fragmented dialogues taking place, it was difficult for Pandora to engage with all its fans and leverage the value of the buzz surrounding their brand.

The quality of user-generated content had to be very high if Pandora was to put it at the forefront of a campaign. Further insight made it clear that Pandora's charms had an inherently social value attached to them. Having a beautiful bracelet full of symbolic value around the wrist is not just a great way to express individuality; it is also a conversation starter. The social nature of the charms allows women to share everything from a personal memory of a loved one or the centrepiece of mutual love for a cause. The Pandora bracelet becomes a facilitator of dialogue between women.

The challenge

The challenge and the consumer insight together made it clear that the bracelet had to be at the centre of the conversation. Pandora's strategy was to give women the tools to share their love for the brand, while expressing their individual style by letting the charms play the leading role. The brand wanted the users to create social content relevant to the brand and of genuine interest to the target group. This way Pandora could retain brand control while leveraging the bracelets' inherent social DNA.

Pandora launched the application in seven focus markets with its own individual and different cultural and linguistic heritages. As a charm's symbolism varies enormously from one market to the other, so Pandora developed a classification system, or taxonomy, that would allow visitors to research their charms.

Much of the dialogue surrounding Pandora was about the meaning of specific charms. Women were given the opportunity to share their personal sentiment towards a charm, and find inspiration in others through the new taxonomy feature in the application. The feature allowed users to assign values and virtues to a specific charm, using pre-defined words such as love, hope, strength, and passion.

Furthermore, users could choose to follow groups around each sentiment, thereby creating sub-communities within the application. Besides the community features, users were also able to easily find retail stores and product info on all designs.

Campaign support

The application launch was supported by a paid media campaign, split between Facebook social ads, search and viral seeding. On Facebook, Pandora created 20 ad themes, based on existing brand tracking data and archetype studies. In total, the campaign contained over a hundred different Social Ads, translated into seven languages. The search campaign incorporated more than 8000 keywords and phrases covering minerals, product id's, sentiments, jewellery categories, geography and much more. Finally, the viral seeding was conducted through banners where the latest bracelet designs were xml-feded into the banners in real time.

Pandora's Facebook application integrates design functionality and the full product catalogue of 1000+ items. The brand's aim was to get people to design and to facilitate a dialogue and mutual sense of connection between fans and the product. Besides designing, user could "like," comment, and share their own and others bracelets and individual charms.

Results

Pandora managed to generate more than 575 000 application installs, more than 1,35 million application visits, more than 112 000 bracelet designs with over 43 000 Likes.

Users discussed and explained what the charms and designs meant to them through more than 61 000 wall posts. More than 18 500 taxonomies were attached to designs.

Over 2000 taxonomy defined groups were formed and followed by users.

Pandora received over 330 000 unique engagement actions through the application with users spending on average 04:22 min designing, commenting, liking and browsing. To this date users have spent more than 4.3 years in total with Pandora's bracelet application.

Facebook over-performed in conversion from click to install with conversion rates from ad click to install peaking at 25% but never going below 10%.

The application peaked at #274 in terms of active users on appdata.com.

Pandora's Facebook page went from 40 000 to more than 240 000 fans.

This campaign was shortlisted at the 2011 Festival of Media Awards in the 'Media Effectiveness: Engagement" category.

Why is this on Cream? This is a brand that got a social media right. It's all about producing relevant content, and Pandora managed not only to create social content relevant to the brand, but also of genuine interest to the target group. There was also some smart use of paid-search and Facebook advertising.