Shack evaluated India's three top-selling luxury car brands – BMW, Audi and Mercedes-Benz – to derive a comparative benchmark of their standing on social platforms. To request for a detailed report, you can reach us at info@shack.co.in

1. SOCIAL LEADERBOARD
LUXURY CAR BRANDS: 21st Jul – 3rd Aug 2012

2. 1:
INDEX:
 SOCIAL LEADERBOARD:
week-on-week performance of top 3 luxury car brands…
 SUMMARY
Misfiring star power…
 OBSERVATIONS
 RECONNECT GRADE:
o BMW
o AUDI
o MERCEDES
 WHY COMMUNITIES?
 METHODOLOGY:
the research process…
 ABOUT SHACK
©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands

3. 2:
SOCIAL LEADERBOARD
21st July – 3rd August 2012
12,00,000
11,00,000 6.3%
10.3%
Community Size (members)
10,00,000
BMW (W3)
9,00,000 22.3%
2.8% BMW (W4)
Audi (W3)
8,00,000
Audi (W4)
Merc (W3)
7,00,000
Merc (W4)
3.5%
6,00,000 2.9%
5,00,000
- 5.0% 10.0% 15.0% 20.0% 25.0%
Activity Grade
Brand Community Size Share (%) Activity Grade
Current 1w ago Current 1w ago Current 1w ago
BMW 11,10,787 9,11,868 40.5% 38.3% 6.3% 22.3%
Audi 10,29,761 8,71,482 37.6% 36.6% 10.3% 2.8%
Merc 5,99,399 5,97,573 21.9% 25.1% 2.9% 3.5%
©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands

4. 3:
SUMMARY
Misfiring star power
If the mere presence of a towering personality would have guaranteed
success, then brand building would have been a simple mystery to
solve, with only established brands with financial muscle coming out
on top. But corporate history is littered with several instances which
go on to prove that it is a far more challenging task. Yet, again and
again, we see brands turning a blind eye to this basic reality when
they spend big on brand endorsements with no measurable result in
mind.
©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands

5. 4:
The purpose of a brand endorsement is simple: A celebrity adds a seal of
authenticity to core values a brand promises and represents. The desired
result of this exercise is a concurrent increase in the brand's share of voice
among a specific target audience with the celebrity reinforcing and
reemphasizing the brand’s persona. For the fortnight ending 3 August 2012,
we witnessed all three brands – BMW, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz – had a
go at this exercise and yet they all fell terribly short of accomplishing the
desired goals.
The digital strategy of these brands is an afterthought rather than
being tied in tightly with their overall marketing objective of
partnering with celebrities.
A research study done by Bates India concluded that “Companies have
to realise that it is ideas and not celebrities that build brands.” In the
digital domain, this conclusion is even more relevant since user engagement
on digital platforms is not ephemeral. Unlike the mainline platforms where
communities are exactly what the brands can pick and choose, the entire
body of community interaction remain visible for everyone to see on digital
platforms. Even in cases where there is an upsurge in community activity
due to celebrities, our measurement has shown a net-negative for the
brands as the outcome of the use of the celebrities in the way it is being
done now.
©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands

6. 5:
OBSERVATIONS
 BMW, deviating from its traditional strategy of building a message
centred on its product, announced the signing of Sachin Tendulkar as
its brand ambassador. But it failed to leverage this association to
favourably impact the appeal of the new 3-series as the ultimate
machine, best in its class. On the contrary, the grade showed a weak
brand reconnect for these brand attributes showing a steep fall from
10.4% to a mere 0.7%.
 The unveiling of the new A8L diesel variant, with Abhishek Bachchan as
the first customer, is devoid of any clear brand goals and targeting,
other than merely generating buzz around the event. Naturally there
was talk among the community about Abhishek Bachchan (5.3%) and
the A8L (8.1%) but a parallel spike in the reconnect grades for
sportiness (0.7%), technology (0.3%) and design (nil) was completely
missing. We firmly believe that an online reportage of the event though
necessary is far off from the meaningful and sustainable interaction that
can be achieved on digital.
 Mercedes-Benz, carrying forth its “mb. Feel it!” initiative, launched their
lifestyle magazine with Chetan Bhagat as the guest editor. Despite a
decent concept, unlike BMW and Audi, Mercedes did not improve its
community activity levels which fell from 3.5% to 2.9%. Given the
profile of the audience Chetan Bhagat appeals to, it is not a strategic fit
for the brand which is targeting a readership "the elite and crème-de-
le-crème set of society" and merely seems a loose attempt to garner
eyeballs. The numbers indicate that the brand was not able to connect
with the digital audience on the theme of 'lifestyle' (<1%).
©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands

7. 6:
RECONNECT GRADE
21st July – 27th July 2012
12.0%
10.4%
Reconnect Grade 10.0%
8.0%
6.5%
6.0%
4.0%
2.5%
2.0% 1.5% 1.5%
0.9%
0.04%
-
6.0%
5.0%
Reconnect Grade
4.0%
3.0%
2.0%
1.1% 1.0%
1.0% 0.8%
0.3% 0.2% 0.1% 0.02%
-
2.0%
1.5%
Reconnect Grade
1.2%
1.0%
0.6%
0.5% 0.3%
0.2% 0.1% 0.1% 0.1%
-
©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands

8. 7:
RECONNECT GRADE
28th July – 3rd August 2012
12.0%
Reconnect Grade 10.0%
8.0%
6.0% 5.3%
4.0%
2.0% 0.8% 0.7% 0.6% 0.6% 0.6%
0.04%
-
6.0% 5.3%
5.0%
Reconnect Grade
4.0%
3.0%
2.0%
0.8%
1.0%
0.2% 0.2% 0.1% 0.04% 0.01%
-
2.0%
1.5% 1.4%
Reconnect Grade
1.0% 0.9%
1.0%
0.5%
0.2% 0.2%
0.1% 0.1%
-
©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands

9. 8:
About the Social Leaderboard
The Leaderboard updates the results derived from our internal tools and
methodologies on a bi-monthly basis, based on which we will bring out our
conclusions. Shack uses a proprietary grading mechanism
ShackMatrix™ to derive the Authority, Activity and Reconnect Grades,
which are key determinants of a brand’s social presence. Read more
about the Matrix and Grades.
Why Communities?
Create, Connect, Curate — The Shack Manifesto for Building
Communities
With the social online world becoming an important cog in a customer’s
relationship with a brand, there is a need for a common language that can
give meaning to the seemingly unstructured social data scattered across
platforms that represents a brand’s interaction with its core community.
As has happened with the introduction of any new communication medium,
practitioners are making the mistake of using the measuring stick (such as
views and reach) of traditional advertising media to gauge success in the
social web. For over a half a century, we have been thinking about
©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands

10. 9:
marketing in terms of campaigns with a very clear beginning, middle and an
end. But the online digital world is currently in the process of being rebuilt
around people and what we know as the social web, in a few years, would
simply be the web.
Therefore, long term success for brands depends on leveraging these
human relationships to create a strong sense of community around
products, concepts and values that are dearest to the brands.
How we measure effectiveness in Online Communities?
The ShackMatrix™ is a proprietary framework that enables assessment of a
brand’s digital footprint in a holistic way. It is a common language designed to
understand the value of a brand’s online efforts expressed through 5 grades that
combine the understanding of traditional branding with the dynamics of a social
online world.
 Presence Grade: Measures how well is the brand represented on digital
platforms.
 Authority Grade: Measures how authoritative is a brand’s owned-
channels for information on the brand and its products.
 TG Grade: Measures the percentage of the desired target group mix
active on the brand’s owned platforms.
 Activity Grade: Measures the level of activity on existing channels.
 Re-Connect Grade: Measures the extent to which community members
connect and identify the brand with the attributes desired by it.
©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands

11. 10:
Data Methodology
We take online performance as a holistic concept. While size of the brand’s
community and level of activity are important factors, the profile of the TG,
the authority of the brand’s platforms and its recall are also equally
important ingredients.
In calculating the ShackMatrix™, we assign weights to the different metrics
on individual platforms in order to combine them into a single comparable
grade that is relevant to the digital objectives of the brand.
The weights are decided based on the relative effectiveness of the platform
to a brand’s community as well as the brand’s own digital goals.
Data Validity and Integrity
We source the data from the brand’s official digital properties. Our scope is
restricted by the data made available through the APIs of the social
platforms we cover.
The coverage of data in this report is restricted to Facebook and Twitter.
More detailed and granular metric studies are done for clients on a project
basis.
©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands

12. 11:
About Shack
Shack is a digital marketing company which brings together brands and their
customers in carefully crafted, wholesome communities, providing exceptional
experiences for all.
We leverage communities for brands:
In order to create and maintain buzz around your brand you need your target
audience to form lasting relationships with your brand.
We build platforms for the communities:
Being a one-stop solution for all your community building and web-based marketing
needs, we craft comprehensive campaigns, based on careful strategy, encompassing
an entire digital eco-system.
We develop content for the platforms:
Along with creating engagement tools both online and off-line we also encourage and
facilitate generation of remarkably effective and compelling content, in a methodical
manner by our own team, and in a random manner, by your community members.
We measure the impact on the brand:
You need to monitor the impact that the campaign has on your brand. This impact is
not something hypothetical, it is hard, tangible, three-dimensional data that not only
tells you where you presently stand, but also tells you where you need to go and
what path you need to follow with the help of Shack’s proprietary Digital Ecosystem
Management tool. Website || Blog || Twitter
©Shack Companis. All Rights Reserved. Social Leaderboard: Luxury Car Brands