• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, April 1, 2013

This Easter weekend, it is best to look beyond the usual bottom-line goals of marketing campaigns and perhaps consider the ways in which these platforms can do both a brand and its customers real good in the world.

It just so happens that a great recent case study from the French mobile provider M6 satisfies both the goals of good social works in citizenship with the broader branding goals of the company. To promote its youth-oriented mobile phone brand last year, M6 has leveraged Instagram as a way for its customers and potential customers to submit images of dissatisfaction.

The idea was that people posted images of things that they would like to change in the world -- little and big -- with suggestions for how to change them or make them just more entertaining. The submissions numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Comments about them reached into the millions. Users voted on their favorite submission. The brand followed through by producing videos that tried to show -- either in real or imagined form -- the changes these users called for enacted in real life.

As a socially conscious and user-focused branding campaign, this was simply brilliant. It literally turned the users into potential heroes. It allowed the brand to create a broad series of video assets that did not have that stultifying patina of branded media sameness. It allowed the users in their imaginations to fuel a rich diversity of creative concepts. In other words, it used an emerging platform for mass communication -- Instagram -- but the resulting creative was anything but mass media. The campaign itself and its product underscored the target market’s highly individualized concept of itself. And best of all, it took the focus almost entirely off the brand in the midst of the message and instead aligned the brand with the values and self-conception of its target market.

According to the company, the campaign went off the charts in its viral distribution. Using a hashtag for the relevant Instagram posts, the company saw 4.6 times more comments on its posts, over 95% of which were positive. And it saw 12 times more stories generated on its page with an increase of over 1400% in sharing. It calculated its cost per view at €0.14.