Reddit Case Study: Nissan And Amazon

This reddit case study post focuses on a joint campaign with Nissan and Amazon that captured the imagination of redditors, and which also employed exemplary community management practices.

Contents

1. The First Car On Amazon
2. What’s In The Box?
3. Community Management Gold

1. The First Car On Amazon

In September 2013, Nissan announced that its 2014 Versa Note model would be sold through Amazon, and that a few lucky buyers would have the car delivered right to their door (instead of picking it up at a local car dealer, which was the case for the majority of Versa sales on Amazon).

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2. What’s In The Box?

A few months later, a redditor posted an image of a very large Amazon box atop a flatbed truck, with the title “What’s the largest item you can have shipped from Amazon? Because I think my neighbor just got it.” The post skyrocketed to the front page of reddit, with over 3,900 points and 4,000 comments. Everyone wanted to know what the heck was in the box, with comments ranging from micro SD cards to a gun safe that’s supposedly the heaviest item Amazon will ship for free.

The stream of guesses, and the pain from not knowing the box’s contents, closely resembled an earlier event on reddit where a New Zealand man moved into a former drug house to find an alluringly-unopenable safe. It too exploded into a stream of guesses of what was in the safe.

Eventually, some smart redditors did their research and found a reference to the Nissan contest from a few months back.

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3. Community Management Gold

After representatives from Amazon and Nissan confirmed that there was a Versa Note in the box, Nissan promoted a post on reddit thanking redditors for making the box such a huge story, which produced over 860 points and 900 comments. They also created an illustration using ideas from redditors about what the gigantic box could next be used for.

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The Nissan community managers were courteous and humorous — which worked well to ease the marketing cynicism of some redditors — and gave out reddit gold to positive and engaging commentors.

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All in all, this campaign was exemplary in how it captured the imagination of redditors and then followed up with positive acts that benefited the community.

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