Teknosa wins gold for its Totem 2002 campaign, how does user content turn into sales?

The survey was run by Pazarlamasyon in cooperation with Areda Piar (DHA; Patron Rehberi). It interviewed, one to one, 10,285 consumers who had direct experience with brands in the relevant categories over the last six months. Fieldwork dates and the split by province are not given in the reports.

Four criteria: trust, liking, reputation and sustainability. All four were weighted equally and turned into one overall score. The brands in the category, Teknosa’s own score and its gap to second place were not disclosed.

As a company announcement. Without the organisers’ own publication, the ranking should not be over-read. What is useful for a business owner is not the ranking but the method behind the award.

UGC is content made by customers rather than the brand: a phone photo, a short video, a review or a story. The brand collects it, features it and gives something of value in return. Its strength is that people read it as a recommendation, not as an ad.

Because it gives the participant a second piece of content to share. A card carrying someone’s own name or story is the kind of thing people post again. That is how a single share can turn into wider reach.

It connects social media interest to a sales step you can measure. A share brings likes; a discount code brings people to the till. To see which shares turned into sales, the code has to be trackable.

The discount code has to be set up in the till software, and the cashier has to know the rule. If the code fails, the customer walks out and the goodwill from the share is wasted. A test transaction before launch reduces that risk.

Tie the discount to a minimum spend or a category rather than the whole basket. Otherwise the campaign attracts only bargain hunters.

With permission, on a window screen, a shelf label or a product page. A real customer’s photo can bring a product that is just sitting on the shelf back to life. Check permissions and personal data rules with the official source; this is not legal advice.

Brands with a community: fans, collectors, hobby groups or a neighbourhood’s regulars. These customers already take photos and share them; the campaign only adds a reward to the habit.

Businesses with no routine for tracking shares, filtering out unsuitable posts and linking codes to the till. A UGC call without a plan gets a few days of attention, then ends with the till not turning over. The method needs a team and a process.

Yes, because a product owner can feed customer stories straight into product development. The path of a brand that moved from marketplaces to its own factory is covered in our piece on Şımart Teknoloji’s Ankara plant. For a manufacturer, customer reviews work like free product research.

In Totem 2002, shares were collected through a separate Instagram account (DHA). This setup keeps the main brand account uncluttered and archives campaign content in one place.

Adding customer photos and reviews to a product page keeps it richer and fresher. Image alt text and a short description help that content get found in search too. On marketplaces, reviews and photos are the cheapest way to stand out from rivals selling the same item.

It does, but language and platform rules change. For sellers who want to reach Europe, a new platform is examined in our piece on easyShop’s European marketplace. Read each marketplace’s rules on reviews and images separately.

Pick a product customers already photograph and set one hashtag for sharing. Give anyone who shares a single-use code that works at the till. Write the rule in the same sentence in the window, at the till and on your social media profile.

Number of shares, number of codes used, average basket on coded purchases and SKU-level sales of the campaign product. These four numbers tell you whether to scale the campaign up. Keep targets in one column and actual results in another.

When nobody in-house has time to track shares, collect permissions and move content onto product pages. We design and run user content campaigns through our digital media consulting work. Retail news is interpreted for you on our retail page.

Yes, you can start with one product and one discount code. What matters is that the code works at the till and that you record the number of shares and codes used.

Only with the customer’s explicit permission. Check permissions and personal data rules with the official source; this is not legal advice.

The sources give no figures for participation, discount use or sales. Only the campaign’s mechanic and the award it won have been made public.