Customer Spotlight Series: CORSAIR and PC Master Race

in Influencer Marketing

Customer Spotlight: Reddit done right: CORSAIR & /r/PCMASTERRACE’s incredible cobranded campaign beats expectations

CORSAIR is a great example of how partnering with influencers and communities can drive your promotions and campaigns to the next level. CORSAIR leveraged their long standing relationship with the PCMR subreddit, a community of PC Gamers on Reddit (the 8th most visited website in the world according to Alexa) to launch a promotion which far exceeded their expectations in community engagement, reach, and entries.

I sat down with the masterminds at CORSAIR, to breakdown how they did it and they offered some great insight into building communities that any brand can use.

Zubair Hossain: Congrats on the widely successful campaign! It was the first thing I heard Monday morning when I walked into the office.

Lauren Premo: Thank you, we were really happy with the outcome!

George Lampard: Appreciate it!

ZH: So for my first question, I was interested in the history of CORSAIR and the PCMR subreddit. How involved is your relationship?

GL: CORSAIR has been a part of PCMR for a long time and I was actually a member even before I joined CORSAIR. With the backing of CORSAIR, I’ve been able to connect to our fans on a different level, helping customers, running competitions, and integrating into that community in a natural way.

For the past two and a half years, we have been very active: taking feedback, helping people when they needed it, responding to causes and things they were doing. We’ve given back to people in need and charities, so it’s been a long process of working with them, and they have been really helpful. The mods of their community have been very supportive.

LP: CORSAIR is very much a DIY sort of company, the process of building a PC is very much in our DNA, so audience wise, PCMR is a perfect fit for us.

ZH: Since your relationship started two and a half years ago, how has it played into your marketing efforts and your overall strategy with CORSAIR.

LP: CORSAIR focuses a lot on corporate citizenship. Being active on reddit, forums and other social platforms and trying to help people out is an important part of that effort. We want CORSAIR employees to have a name and a face to show that we’re not just a corporate wall of processes and procedures.

It makes sense to associate the people with the passion we have for making quality products, the best way to do that is to talk one on one with the customers.

ZH: Of course! Whenever I talk with influencers about brands, they always say they love it when brands communicate with them and be personable, and you all are doing a great job of that. It’s about humanizing your social media handle and realizing that it makes people see that it’s not just a company but a person behind that handle and then the message is there, and most importantly that you are a person too.

LP: Exactly, that is really our key message. We are people too and are making products that we also would love to use.

ZH: I can imagine there was a lot of logistical clout behind launching this campaign. Who were the main shakers and players and how long did it take you all to get this going?

LP: Haha, not long. For us, we already have a positive relationship with the admins at PCMR, and George has been involved for many years. Empowering our social team to do something to give back to their community was really an easy decision.

GL: And this wasn’t the first major giveaway CORSAIR has done. It has been a long relationship where we have been working to establish trust, where we have done not just giveaways, but also individual things like helping members in the community when they were in need, and joining in discussions and everyday posts, not just those relevant to us.

LP: Sideqik is such an easy platform to use, we were able to set up the giveaway very quickly. We reached out to partners for help with prizing who we have a great relationship with, Gigabyte and ControllerChaos, and then worked with PCMR to get their support.

GL: [PCMR] also finalized the design as well. So they had a lot of input there. You know it’s all about giving and listening, and that back and forth conversation with them.

ZH: A side question, George are you the person that is in the subreddit all the time responding to people?

GL: I’m definitely the most active there, but actually a lot of our company browse and are pretty active on Reddit. Some people from our company also distinguish themselves as CORSAIR employees, like I do. Look out for our CORSAIR flair or CORSAIR_ usernames.

You know we always try to go in there and support and explain. Whether it’s a product that someone needs help with, or a new product we launch. We go in there and explain the decision making behind that and get feedback from our customers.

ZH: Were the results of this campaign better or worse than you expected?

GL: Definitely better, from the past, the expectations we had were about half of the result we had this time. This one definitely blew it out the water.

ZH: If you were to go back and change anything, what would you have done differently.

GL: Not much that I can think off, I am really happy with how it went. I might have added an email activation afterwards, that could have been helpful to have. In the past, when we did smaller giveaways, we had decided against it [email activations] because we didn’t want to spam people with notifications. In the past, we didn’t have so many people asking questions. Confirmations and follow ups would have been nice.

ZH: Thank you both for your time, I’m looking forward to seeing your continued growth and fun community engagements!