Nothing spectacular, really, apart from the fact that they seem to be looking at user participation rather seriously. Some effort and experimentation has been successful, and more money should follow soon. Some quotes from an article in Business Standard should explain it:
– Anisha Motwani, Marketing Director of GM India says that “community participants are opinion leaders who help in adopting brand values by sharing personal experience, views and suggestions with other members.”
– Prasad Narasimhan, VP Marketing, TVS Motors believes that says that the Internet can be leveraged to make the audience relate to the products; response is much higher and faster on the Internet than other media and TVS’ interactive site for the Apache has resulted in 1,70,000 enquiries since Feb ’06.
– Cadbury India’s site – meethamoments.com – is an extension of its commercial, and has had over 93,000 visits and over 500 entries for users’ “meetha moments”.
Promotions seem to be the way that they’re going – we’ve seen quite a few startups offer free ipods of late – and companies are also using regular contests to get visitors to return. What is interesting is that companies are allowing the word of mouth and linkages to bring in the audience. I’m also wondering about whether Pepsi’s Blue Billion site will last beyond the Champions Trophy, since it seems to be both an entertainment and social web portal. Incidentally, they’re using SEM (screencap). I can understand marketers using contests and promotions for increasing recall, but do freebies help build brands?
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