The Energy Drink V has a profile on the social networking site Bebo called the People’s Republic of V.  V held a competition where people had to come up with an idea on how V was to spend $100k and a pallet of V. People were encouraged to submit their ideas according to the idea criteria and free prizes were up for grabs too.

When it came to deciding which idea was the winning idea, V decided to get the people to vote online using the poll section. I returned to the site at a later date to see whether they had announced the final winning idea from the poll, but you got the idea that there had been some cheating going on and the poll had been scraped.

V proceeded to hold a second poll to let people help decide on how they were going to determine a winner. So once again I waited for the results of the second poll and subsequently returned back to the site.  V stated… ‘the polls says let the judges decide’ which idea is the winner. So, then we had to wait for the judges to make their final decision and this seems to take forever.

By this stage I had lost interest and many weeks later returned to the site to see if the judges had made a final decision as to which idea won the competition. The results were not immediately apparent. I checked the blog section but didn’t find a post regarding the final winning idea. Looking through the photo section I saw photos of the judges actually judging the $100k competition, one of the judges doodles and 14 photos with captions on a few $100k competition entries.

There was a video posted in the video section that says ‘$100k idea – Brazilian street party‘. A Brazilian street party would be cool, but there were also other great ideas. For example one ‘idea of the day‘ was to throw a pallet of V from the back of a Hercules plane and let the people know that it’s raining V.

Back to the matter in hand, I was still at a loss as to the winning idea.

Eventually, I received an email from the People’s Republic of V saying: “A couple of months ago we asked you, the People’s Republic of V what we should do with $100k and a pallet of V. Gary’s idea was that we should throw away the $100K! And he won. So we’re going to do it soon…very soon…” Aha, at last, confirmation of the winning idea – phew! So, the $100,000 is to be divided into three and thrown in to the wind in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin.

The competitions in the Republic of V are relentless for their worshipers. I say worshipers rather than followers because looking at some of the comments they really do appear to worship the V product and appear to be true brand advocates. They recently had a few more competitions including: Be in to win a pimped out V ride, and a Big Day Out double pass competition. Another prize you could win was a case of V.

V wanted to hear from people as to what they thought about V by answering three questions. 1) When I drink V it makes me feel? 2) If I were to describe V as a person I would say they were? 3) If I were in charge of V, my brand slogan for V would be? The winners got a case of V on their door step.

V work hard to engage their target market with all these competitions and freebies. They aren’t afraid to ask their V members what they really want and the people who frequent the People’s Republic of V are more than happy to oblige. They are very happy to express themselves through comments, forums, polls, photos and more.

V in return gain insight into their customers’ perception of their brand and are able to carry out low cost market research.  Unfortunately, their marketing team appeared to be slow on the uptake of managing the “How to spend $100K and a pallet of V” competition, which could have resulted in their brand advocates being frustrated or disappointed.    It’s important that when marketers carry out such competitions and campaigns online that they have the technical expertise to ensure a smooth running campaign and its delivered in a timely manner.