First direct happiness campaign

We love recruiting for First Direct and HSBC. They have a great culture and way of working. We also love their marketing campaigns; the recent Picture of Happiness campaign was fantastic. It invited customers to send in their pictures illustrating happiness, in whatever form it meant to them. Some amazing photos were submitted. After whittling down the 2,300 entries to a final seven, customers were invited to vote for the overall winner. This campaign worked on several levels; it engaged their Facebook audience and helped to create new likers, it created plenty of PR and online buzz, it got entrants involved and engaged by allowing them to pick the winner, and perhaps most importantly, it generated content. Customer generated content, also known as user generated content is becoming more and more important in today’s multi-channel world. Lots of different ways to talk to customers are good, but it means that brands needs lots of stuff to talk about and share. By making the competition available on the website as well as Facebook they recognised that, despite popular opinion, not everyone is on Facebook. Mainly though, we like it because of the wonderful photos.