A+M Searchlight: Nikon 'I am' campaign

A+M SEARCHLIGHT    DIGITAL   NIKON

Malaysia - Nikon rolled out its integrated campaign titled 'I Am' in Malaysia last year in conjunction with the popular camera manufacturer's 95th anniversary.

As reported by A+M in September, the campaign was aimed at making the Nikon brand more accessible and attractive to customers through personal appeal.

Nikon created a separate website where consumers could download ‘I Am' wallpapers and gain more information on Nikon Coolpix compact cameras. All eight cameras have a different Nikon ‘I Am' tag lines to suit the different ‘personalities' and functionalities of each camera.

The campaign, primarily targeted at young urban adults and amateur photographers, ran in newspapers, magazine, radio, outdoor, cinema and digital channels. Various promotions were also carried out at Nikon shops and the Nikon Center in KL, as well at through the brand's social media presence.

A check on Google's Insights for Search tool reveals that generally searches were high between August 2011 and January 2012. Interestingly there was a slight spike in searches between the days of Aug 28-Sept 3 most likely around the time of the roll out of this campaign of Nikon 1 series. And searches remained high until January 2012 when it shot up to an all time high, the highest year on year, as seen here:

The ‘I Am' launch also received substantial coverage in the local mainstream media, but these did not appear to generate a substantial increase in the search term during this period.

There was also a ground event ‘I Am NIKON Show' from Oct 19-23 2011 at the Mid Valley shopping mall, which boosted search slightly that week.

It appears that ‘Nikon' is a popular brand that Malaysians are continuously searching for. The Insights for Search graph also shows searches from around the states in Malaysia -- and in this case, Malaysians from Putrajaya were the keenest, as shown on the regional bars below the graph. At the same time there were the ‘top searches' and fastest rising' searches on ‘nikon' showing that ‘nikon malaysia' was the top term and ‘nikon 1 price' the fastest rising search term.

What's interesting is that the search term begins to take an upward hike from December 4 onwards and hits its highest yet on Jan 1-7. This could be due to rumours around the highly anticipated Nikon D4 launch.

A search on both the terms does not reveal searches for ‘nikon d4' possibly because of the short time frame which did not generate enough search volume for the term to be tracked. But what we can see clearly is that the term ‘nikon d4' is placed fourth in the fastest rising searches on this chart. Local newspapers published the launch of this model in early Jan 2012.

What many marketers can take advantage of is that the Insights for Search is able to gauge the trends of upcoming searches done on a particular term and at the same time what consumers are likely to search for. In this case, consumers were surely not looking for ‘I am Nikon' instead, they were just keying in ‘nikon' and probably searching for the latest information. They were also being very specific and were looking for the exact model of the camera. Consumers were also comparing brands, as ‘canon' was the other term frequently searched for.

Search can chart patterns and show trends over the year - and sometimes bring up some little surprises and nuggets of market intelligence that you would not be able to find elsewhere.

In this graph where we compared ‘nikon' searches between 2004 to 2012, the dotted lines on the graph shows the forecast search -- a predictable trend.



Google noted that the numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don't represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalised and presented on a scale from 0-100.

The links provided to the specific Google Insights for Search results are correct at time of writing.

A+M Searchlight is a monthly column. 

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