Pranav Bhasin

They have been all over TV for the last 2 months, but if you missed them for some reason, watch them here before you read on: ibibo ad #1, ibibo ad #2

Notice something strange – its an internet company, that too a social network using a mass media platform to advertise, huh. I wonder who is running their marketing, but whatever they are doing goes completely counter to the concept ( of social networking ) that they are selling.

So whats wrong here – a couple of things:

1) Mass Media = Old Media. This is the age of sending specific, targeted messages to people who are interested in listening to them, not blasting people with messages they don’t want to hear. Imagine a joint family watching a movie and one of these ads shows up in the interval – how many of them are the real target audience?

2) Mass Media is for branding. Mass Media is used by companies that want to build brands, like HUL or P & G, who want you to remember the name of their soap so that you pick it over others in the shopping mall. Using a Mass Media approach for intent driven advertising has all signs of failure.

3) Mass Media is costly. Every time your ad runs on TV, it sets you back by a few lacs at least. For a company that is offering a free service, that can be a huge setback in the balance sheet and will make it extremely hard for them to become profitable. Yes, they may get some users, but how long can they sustain by pooling in money from their other businesses.

4) To top it all, the concept of social gaming has been copied from facebook, which is not only going strong globally, but also making inroads into the Indian market. Plus, they have an extremely viral strategy going for them which means that everyone that is on ibibo is probably also on facebook. Which of them is going to stick – the answer seems obvious.

5) Finally, you need to scream when your product doesn’t speak for itself. I haven’t used ibibo games, but my guess is that they don’t have a good product out there which is why they need to burn so much money in marketing to get noticed. Good products, especially the ones that are social, spread quickly through word of mouth ( or mouse ).

What they should do? Here is my advice:

1) Come up with a unique product concept, think about something that has a local zing to it, something that facebook is not going to do. So when you copy farmville, you have direct competition from facebook, but if you choose to do something around IPL for instance, that is something that the nation is already crazy about and can ensure visibility for the product from the word go.

2) Stop burning money in Mass Media for God’s sake. That is for companies that sell soap, not for internet social networks. Instead, spend more time planning an internet strategy that would spread the word – a bit of adwords, a bit of SEO and lots of social media could be the perfect mix.

3) Most importantly, focus on building virality inside the service itself. This is an intensive process and requires depth in product management to pull off. But if you have the money, why not get some good guys who can figure it out and turn the service into one where every new user brings in 10 of his/her friends rather than wasting that money in Mass Media.

4) Specifically regarding social gaming, a neat thing to do would be to have a strategy that lets other sites embed games inside them. That opens up avenues for partnership and several distribution channels which will spread the word far and wide with very little cost.

What is your opinion about their strategy? Any solutions you would like to propose?

One thing I have always marveled at is the ability of watch companies to market their products. Imagine the odds in front of them:

1) The product was invented in 1800s and has reached a stage beyond innovation ( except for the ones in James Bond movies ) – can’t sell watches based on differentiators anymore.

2) Everyone already owns at least one watch – market is already saturated.

3)  New breed of devices and cellphones make it redundant – who needs a watch when you have a cellphone and are on twitter 24×7.

How much harder can it get? And yet they manage to sell watches by the dozen.

But how? Well, look at the rolex ad on the left for instance. It talks about piano, seduction, soul and what not – none of these have anything to do with a watch. But all of these are words that have been carefully chosen to connect with prospective buyer of this watch.

As I looked at a few more of these ads, one mistake that we internet marketers do often became very clear. As internet marketers, we are often too focussed on selling our product by highlighting how the features our product offers are better than the competition. While this approach works for some companies that grab the attention of sufficient early adopters, most other companies struggle and keep adding on feature after feature in hope of selling their wares.

Its time internet marketers start looking at customers and thinking about what would grab their attention about your product. This will not only make them better marketers, but may also give some brilliant insights about the target segment that would have otherwise been elusive.

Guy Kawasaki is in Bangalore and yesterday I had the opportunity to meet him in the tweetup at Nasscom Product Conclave.  He is a very friendly person and went into great detail on the strategy he uses to market AllTop over twitter.

Now, I have great respect for him as a person and as a thought leader, but there are some things that I did not like about his talk.

But before that, here are the things that I liked:

a) Insight on into how automating your tweets can save you a lot of time and effort.
b) Stats on how tweeting the same post at different times of the day can almost double your hits.
c) Emphasis on the basic twitter principle – provide value to your followers.

Things that I would have loved to hear in the talk:

a) How to build a complete marketing strategy around twitter and other social media tools?
b) How to measure the return on investment – even though twitter is free, you spend time on it and that costs money?
c) How does twitter compare with other online marketing media in terms of value for your investment?
d) How long does it take for your twitter activity to start bearing fruit?

Things that I did not like about his talk:

a) Too much self-promotion – alltop and tweetmeme appeared over hundred times in the talk.
b) The proposed strategy of using alltop content to generate tweets seems like self-fulfilling prophecy. Makes me think if the real purpose of the talk was to talk about twitter or to make everyone in the room build alltop pages.
c) His strategy would work for twitter users like him that have a very high following ( because they are a celeb, role model etc ) but what about tweeters who have not acquired that status yet?
d) His strategy is synonymous to twitter spam – I believe that sooner or later, filtering systems will be built on twitter to filter out spam and that will be the end of this strategy.

What is your opinion of the talk? Do you agree with my assessment here – do let me know! BTW, here are some shots that I took during the tweetup:

Find all the Guy Kawasaki NASSCOM photos here!