To grow a tree, you need… a seed? A fruit? A flower? Yes, but sometimes a contest is enough. A golden rule in corporate communication is: every message should always harmonize with the company’s profile. This is especially true when it comes to Ecor Naturasì, which is very connected with its values. We started from here to create and develop 100volteSì (100 times yes) and Coltiva i biopensieri (grow biological thoughts), two contests in the spirit of organic life-style.
The briefing
Two distinct briefings for two very different contests: an operation to celebrate the opening of the hundredth shop and to promote its items; and a corporate project, to emphasize Ecor’s values and to acquire prospects’s data. On one side a brand-like communication, on the other an institutional one. Both, though, had the same guidelines: convey brand’s principles and create a distinguished and involving customer experience, with a simple and user-friendly pattern.
The approach
When Olojin manages rewarding contests, its done throughly: from concept design to graphical layout; from the website creation to legal administering of the whole process. We conceived and developed 100volteSì to celebrate the opening of NaturaSì’s hundredth shop. After registration on the website, users could choose 10 of their favourite products from among 1000 items located on a virtual shelf and place them in a bag, on which they could decide to put a specif image. A dedicated jury and public selected the winner and this one won his/her shopping bag and the image was used for a limited time on the stores usual grocery bags. In this way every participant could get to know, in playful mode, the wide range of organic goods available. We developed Coltiva i Biopensieri with a poetic and evocative mindset, using a sybolic graphical design, that differs from a usual visual gallery. Every user could enter in contest’s website an “organic action”, by relating a personal daily habit for environment’s sake. In the website, this act transormed into a leaf or a “good” insect, that by resting on a plant’s stem, would help it grow into the big “biopensieri” tree: a unanimous action that reflect the kind of commitment all should have for our planet.
The extra idea
Collect complete personal data to enrich the company’s database or simplify access to the competition to ensure the widest possible participation? These are two apparently conflicting needs, but there is a solution. For Ecor’s contests we created two distinct access modes: a quicker registration (only name and email required or through Facebook account) for those who just wanted to vote for a winner and a longer entry form for participants. In this way we allowed the greatest easiness to those who jsut wanted to express their “like” for a friend’s ecological action or bag, while, at the same time, ensuring a most complete data collection for the brand database.
Could voters change their minds? Yes, of course: Anytime they could add information to their basic profiles and have access to the contest, becoming participants.
What else can be offered to users? News, recipies, and insights. In coding and designing graphics for Coltiva i Biopensieri’s plant, we willfully maintained a poetic and magical mindset. The tree had to grow virtually endlessly through user’s eco-friendly actions, but we did not want it to look always the same. Our graphic team and developers worked out a structure with different but repeatable patterns that embedded randomly between the plant’s root and tip. The image used came from a real hand-colored drawing, that conveyed a yet more inspiring effect. The aesthetics did not disrupt the site’s usability: changing modules were uploaded little by little, to maintaing a lightweight website, but some push-buttons allowed the tree to be scrolled from top to bottom. A search function enabled users to find specific insects or leaves, that once clicked on, revealed which ecological gestures it contained. Every user could choose, when entering the environment-friendly action, what to be: a bee, a butterfly, a ladybug or a leaf. A bit of magic and a bit of biodynamics: this is Ecor.
