Nissan Middle East scoops Gold Award at MEPRA

Nissan Middle East’s recent ‘Innovation that Excites’ activation for the new Nissan X-Trail on the popular social media platform, Instagram, has won the top prize at the Middle East Public Relations Awards (MEPRA) in the ‘Consumer Goods’ category.

“Working closely with our agency, Memac Ogilvy, we produced a unique and effective activation on the most engaging social media platform of all: Instagram,” says Yolande Pineda, Nissan Middle East’s Director of Corporate Communications. 

“We wanted the introduction of the new Nissan X-Trail to stand out from the hundreds of car launches that happen here each year, and to live up to Nissan’s promise of ‘Innovation that Excites’. The net result of this campaign for Nissan was an organic 32 percent increase in followers on Instagram, and this award at the prestigious MEPRA is a great recognition of our efforts to bring innovative engagement platforms with our customers.”

The new Nissan X-Trail appeals to young and adventurous people with a lust for life – many of whom are avid users of Instagram, attracted by its interactivity with a global audience, and they create engaging content each day that expresses their personalities. With this target audience in mind, an innovative Instagram campaign was deemed to be ideal because it fits in with their existing behaviour and interests.

After careful analysis and in-depth research, Nissan’s team identified six of the UAE’s most active and influential Instagram users, all of whom enjoy huge audiences and embody what the new Nissan X-Trail is all about: cutting edge, connected, confident, adventurous and bold.

Using the 2015 Nissan X-Trail before it was publicly available, Nissan sent these six individuals on a unique road trip to an undisclosed location, during which they competed against one another by sharing their experiences with their followers. Every time the Instagrammers received a strategically chosen ‘trigger word’ (such as ‘adventure’, ‘X-Trail’ and ‘road trip’) in their comments, they earned points which were added to, the more interaction they had with their followers.

Using Instagram, the six shared their experiences through photographs every step of the way with their followers and, using the hashtag #TheOneToFollow, which communicates the new Nissan X-Trail’s superiority over its competition, Nissan managed to effectively communicate its message in the most engaging way possible and the terminology being used by users and followers of the chosen six demonstrated acute awareness of the X-Trail model.

Within just six hours and without any monetary support, Nissan Middle East had reached more than 1.8 million people and received over 25,000 social media interactions in the forms of likes, comments and ‘regrams’, with ‘Nissan’ and ‘X-Trail’ being mentioned nearly 20,000 times.