The Internet and the mobile phone have opened up new ways for marketers to reach out to consumers. Several large companies, selling everything from manufactured goods to consumer products and services, are crafting innovative strategies around these. BT's Kushan Mitra reports.
Mayank Pareek’s job has been fairly easy of late. As Chief General Manager, Marketing, at the country’s largest automaker, Maruti-Suzuki, his job, of selling cars, has rarely been easier.
Despite rising commodity prices (and, thus, car prices) and stiff interest rates, cars are still moving out of showrooms rather fast. But, Pareek has not been resting, and Maruti has been playing around with the Internet—not just sticking up banner advertisements at large websites or text-based ads through Google AdSense—by encouraging his team to interact with consumers using a host of online services.
“We have put up videos on services such as YouTube and have actively seeded discussions on online forums using social media. This is where the consumers are, this is where they interact; so, it makes sense for us to have a group on Orkut or Facebook,” says Pareek.
When Maruti recently launched the Swift Dzire sedan, it had a comprehensive teaser campaign online and invited people who clicked through the campaign to watch a live webcast of the event, and, according to Pareek, over 80,000 people did. “We have found that a large majority of people who are buying the car were actually influenced by our online campaign and visited the products website.
Nokia India has successfully run campaigns riding the web, including an ongoing one (on http://www.remixrahmansada/) involving music composer A.R. Rahman where users can go online to a website, remix tracks from Rahman’s latest movie and win a session with the composer. “These campaigns have been hugely successful because we have added a social element in every contest by allowing peers to review entries,” Taneja says.
In fact, Group M, India’s largest media-buying house, has already seen a level of success in its mobile campaigns. “Last year, we did a campaign for ICICI Bank where we had to generate 20,000 leads. By placing ads on prominent mobile portals, we generated 72,000 leads in a month,” Thadani explains. But it is not just banner advertisements; Thadani also explains that Gupta’s idea of call-back tonebased advertising is not fantasy and can even be customised based on the caller’s profile.