HP Gets It Right With 31 Days of the Dragon

Situation: Nine months after the launch of the HDX Dragon Entertainment Notebook, HP knew a traditional marketing campaign wasn’t going to cut it. Which is why, with the help of Buzz Corps (now Ivy Worldwide), they created the 31 Days of the Dragon campaign, which began on May 9th and lasted until June 8th of 2008. HP knew the influence of bloggers was on the rise, and wanted to build longstanding relationships with the writers who they felt would support them in their ongoing technological endeavours. The idea behind the campaign was simple: engage the blogosphere and garner excitement for the launch of the HDX Dragon. To do that, HP needed  a way to promote their product in a nonabrasive, interactive way so that writers and readers alike would feel excited and inclined to particpate.

Solution: They succeeded in doing so by creating a banded community with an incentive to generate positive discussion pertaining to the product and the overall HP brand. They quite carefully chose 31 blogs that attracted a similar audience to the one they were targeting with the “Dragon.” They then gave each blogger the opportunity to give away one HDX Dragon Notebook–one contest a day, one winner a blog. Essentially, they put the bloggers behind the steering wheel of their product, giving them the green light to host the contest in whichever way they wanted. The 31 bloggers were even allowed to create their own images, logos, microsites, videos and rules in support of the giveaway.

Cross-promotion happened organically, which was not only good for each blogger’s traffic (150%–5,000% increase) but even better for HP. Soon, stylized HP promotion was infiltrating the net as bloggers and contest participants began sharing their links around the web.

Results (based on HPshopping.com):

• 84% increase in sales on the HDX Dragon System
• 14% increase in traffic
• 10% increase in overall consumer PC sales
• 50 million impressions (data from Alexa)
• 10,000 reader/entrant videos on YouTube and Blip.tv
• 380,000 links to the giveaways according to Google reports
• 25,000 total entries out of the 31 chosen blogs

The SlideShare graph below shows the drastic increase in sales following the launch of the campaign:

Most impressively, however, was the total cost of the campaign. $250,000…for the 31 HDX Dragon Notebooks handed over to each blogger, software and shipping included. Money spent on actual media? Zero.