Duxbury eMarketing Drive Takes Chequered Flag
- Published on Thursday, 08 March 2007 01:28
Designed, implemented and managed by the e-marketing arm of international electronic messaging specialist Striata exclusively for Duxbury Networking, the Formula One game covers the entire F1 racing season of 17 Grand Prix events, the first of which took place in Melbourne, Australia on 18 March.
Duxbury Networking managing director Graham Duxbury, a racing driver and former Formula One commentator on SABC, wanted to create more general interest in his business and this sowed the seed from which the web-based Formula One competition bloomed.
“Modern Formula One racing is a high technology sport, reliant upon state of the art equipment, computer analysis and networking technology to transfer critical information on the racing cars, motors, tyres and overall performance,” says Mia Papanicolaou, Striata’s eMarketing Manager.
“With Duxbury’s motor racing heritage and company focus on distributing world-class networking products and solutions, a competition based on Grand Prix motor racing was an appropriate fit for the business and for the MD. There is also a very keen support base of enthusiasts in South Africa who follow the Formula One Grand Prix circuit.”
First implemented in 2004, the Grand Prix Prediction competition has a strong following. Anyone interested in Formula One can register for the competition from the Duxbury Networking web-site (www.duxbury.co.za) and all communications thereafter are sent via email to the avid fan database. The next Grand Prix takes place at Sepang, Malaysia on 8 April.
Participants try to predict the outcome of the race, entering who they think will finish in the top eight in the correct order. This year the game sees a change in the way the points are allocated, making the game more strategic, rewarding entrants who have done their homework rather than taking “lucky guesses“.
In each Grand Prix 10 points is allocated for every driver predicted in the correct final position. However, a sliding scale is now also applied to entrants’ predictions where they have placed drivers in positions other than their actual final race position.
Prizes are allocated to each Grand Prix race, with the top eight point scorers each getting a prize. Points are then accumulated throughout the season and a grand prize is awarded to the winner. By referring friends, players get additional chances to predict, increasing their chances of winning.
All competitors receive an individual email after each Grand Prix informing them of their points tally for that event, as well as their position overall for that race. Furthermore, participants have the opportunity to view their overall standing in the competition as a whole.
“The game provides an effective means of two-way communication between Duxbury Networking and the players, encourages people to visit the website regularly and builds relationships,” says Papanicolaou. “About 70% of the player base comes back to play every year, so a bit of a ‘cult’ following is developing.”
Duxbury Networking has developed solid relationships with leading vendors in the networking, interconnectivity, wireless and convergence technology environments and is well known for its Duxbury branded modems.
”The competition is a phenomenal communication tool that provides a fun, interactive platform for us to educate and promote the NETGEAR home networking and SMB products,” said Duxbury Networking MD Graham Duxbury. “Locally, we have been able to substantially increase brand awareness and market share of NETGEAR products with the help of this competition.”
"Our eDocument project has been a great success. Striata enabled us to go to market with a quality solution that is not only achieving our customer satisfaction goals, but is exceeding our goal to convert paper to electronic documents."