Updated: November 01, 2019
Diwali as a period in any marketer’s timetable is a crucial period. However, there is also a lot of noise in terms of brand messaging. A lot of festive messaging which is sales based and tactical gets registered as white noise. This means, customers develop a blind spot to 90% of Diwali messaging which asks them to buy into a deal or the product/service.
The Insight: WestCharge tapped into a simple human insight. During the festive season, India as a country regards sending and forwarding of festival greetings as a very important action to be complied with. It serves as a social leveler, a networking gesture or even a commercial diplomatic tactic. The second insight we looked into was the effect that with the millennial TG and premium urban audiences, the need to move towards a cleaner minimal Diwali was building steam. Thirdly, social media greetings nowadays far outnumber personal greetings or phone greetings, with everyone wanting a unique and relevant message to differentiate their personal greeting. We thus wanted to appeal to a wide audience from teenagers to grandparents yet remain on trend with our current environment.
Whatsapp: In order to differentiate from the clutter, WestCharge innovatively used WhatsApp for business as a conversation starter. Data wise, this platform is the most used social media platform with maximum engagement times as well as utility. Moreover, the utility of the platform is at its peak during Festivals with reported outages due to the high number of greetings being forwarded.
The message: We ditched the traditional gawdiness of the festival by advocating ‘powering up Diwali’ by lighting up the most basic and relatable element – Human Relationships.
Making a B2B brand personal: This opener then followed up into audiences on Insta/Facebook/Linkedin/Twitter being asked to message a ‘Hi’ to us through an post/bio embedded link to our Whatsapp for Business account. This would lead to the brand supplying users with quirky, traditional and unique messaging points all asking to charge up Diwali their own way. The crafted creatives were not available anywhere else on any social media portal and designed to be forwarded as a greeting in itself. We thus made ourselves a part of the Diwali celebrations by –
- Tapping into a common human insight
- Establishing unique one to one long term communication channels with supply of content which when forwarded would further act as a medium of mobile branding.
Engagement: We now have an active Whatsapp chat going on with most of the new contacts added in this time with people forwarding the creatives, thanking us, wishing us and suggesting contacts where they would like to see our chargers placed. Our Whatsapp business account is used for Sales and Customer Service as well so this will enable anyone to get in touch with us in a way they are used to. The screenshot below is the sweetest greeting we had with a customer delighted to have received the creatives.
Moving beyond engagement we would like to build lasting bonds with our customers, partners and end-users. And this is just the beginning of our story…
Author
Dheeraj Challagali
