Case Study: How to use Social Media to promote your brand

There are numerous examples of companies using Social Media for their business purposes. The most common is to promote one’s brand, to allow consumers to experience the brand, allow it to enter their private sphere and even show their affinity to the brand to their peers. I will not enumerate the psychological motivation behind such actions but rather focus on an example – a regional one – in which Social Media activity is being triggered and even had to compete with classical media, a newspaper.

Case Study: Bischofshof Beer Queen Vote

Bischofshof is 360 year old German brewery based in Regensburg, Bavaria. Aside from their regular varieties the brewery also offers the „Bruckmandl“ which seems to be targeted to a younger yet sophisticated audience (the radio spots use American dialect). Breweries in Germany are struggling with a decrease in demand and in Bavaria in particular, the market is colored by a tough competition between numerous small and medium sized regional breweries. To fight beer giants such as Becks or Krombacher, these breweries have to make sure their regional target groups remain loyal and enjoy drinking a local beer.

Among other marketing activities, Bischofshof holds an annual beer queen election. This year, 10 young women have been elected to fight for the title of Bischofshof Beer Queen – two others will become Beer Princess.

The election takes place in several stages. Two jury decisions, an online pool and a weekly newspapers voting contribute to the final decision. Via online poll and newspaper voting the consumers and brand fans are invited to participate by not only voting for their favorite candidate but also by spreading word-of-mouth and online by sharing the news about the election. On the Bischofshof website, visitors can constantly check the current ranking. Facebook turned out to be a preferred medium to spread the news and to activate one’s peers to vote for the favored candidate. It should be mentioned that the brewery does not (yet) have its own facebook fan page. Given the number of votes in the online poll (the leading girl currently has more than 1300 votes) you can imagine that website traffic must have incresed greatly through this campaign.
The other benefit is that the brand is word on the street, especially in the greater social networks of the 10 candidates: their friends, their colleagues, fellow students, family,….

It remains to be seen how well the competition is being documented on the Bischofshof website. And what is most interesting: It would be very interesting to see which medium resulted in more votes – online media or classical media. We will try to get information on that after the new queen has been chosen.

SOM is voting for Daniela Meidinger! Join the vote today! Thursday 22 April is the last day to participate!

Here is the link:
http://www.bischofshof.de/aktuelles/Wer_wird_die_Bierkoenigin_91x6.htm

More info on Bischofshof:
www.bischofshof.de