Continuing on from my last blog post and my research into existing successful social media campaigns, I also looked at Spotify Wrapped and how a campaign from 2017 is still valued and refurbished every year.
Spotify Wrapped
In 2017, Spotify released a new and innovative way of looking at your personalised stats and data collected from a year of listening to music. It gave users a personalised experience full of data about the amount of music they have listened to throughout the year. Then further curating a handful of playlists with those specific users' top songs and artists of the year.
Why it worked
Music has long been a community builder and a talking point for many people. People connect and make relationships through love of music, so by a popular streaming service creating a unique experience that unveils its users specific music taste of that year and allowing for it to be shared over social media - it establishes a community in which people can share their favourite artists and music statistics from that year. It enables them to have a conversation with people they have never met before, about their shared taste in music and build relationships that may never have been made otherwise.
It also ‘created a sense of competition and achievement’ between users as well without any monetary incentives as it made people compare the amount of hours they've spent listening.
Music is a part of everyone's lives. Even more so over the past 10 years with the introduction to streaming using platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Spotify is one of the most used platforms for streaming music with around 422 million users and every one of those users has a unique music taste that it caters for. It is so popular and works so well because it learns as you use it. It learns the type of music you listen to in order to offer you unique suggestions to playlists and songs you would like. It uses its artificial intelligence to collect data and build a unique experience for each individual user.
So, introducing a campaign like Spotify Wrapped, which allows people to see their own curated data and statistics on what they’ve been listening to over that past year is one of the best marketing campaigns it has done. Due to the nature of it, it can be redone every year without effort and people look forward to seeing the randomness of their music taste and how much it has changed not only throughout the year but over the years too. It sparks conversation between family and friends on their statistics each year, it builds hype as the year goes on for people to see what it will be like this year.
In addition, it creates a feeling of ‘fomo’ (fear of missing out) from people that don't use the platform and therefore draws more people into using their software in order to get the personalised touch that Spotify offers.
What to take from this
The biggest thing to take from a campaign like this, is what it ultimately does. It creates a sense of community among users - people feel included and a part of something. It builds suspense and hype and creates an event that people look forward to every year. In addition to, boosting its performance and engagement because it entices people using other platforms to get a more curated experience and feel included with their friends.
Applying this to my project
Upon doing this research and understanding why Spotify and Spotify wrapped is a huge success every year, it is clear that consistency is key as well as personalisation. People respond better to projects and campaigns when they feel like they are not being marketed to. If they feel they are a part of a community and network that caters to them rather than them just being a number in millions of others. A campaign also works well if it is made to be an event that people look forward to as it sparks conversation among people and a hype and suspense into what will take place each time. It gives people something to look forward to.
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