Tag Archives: 2009

Marketing Case Study: Tata Nano

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Tata Nano

Tata’s Nano is not a car, it’s a PHENOMENON. Tata Nano is undoubtedly being looked upon as the next big(actually small) thing. With a lot at stake on Nano, it’s success is extremely crucial. Let’s delve into what all has been to market(online+offline) the car of the year.

Online Marketing:

1) Website: TataNano.com
A website dedicated to Tata Nano was up and running since January last year. The website saw huge spurts in traffic when it was the website was released and when the car was launched.

Traffic for tatanano.comThe folks at Tata have a done a good job at building a beautiful website which experience wise is also good.

Nano Website
The major sections of the site are
a) Galary (both pictures and videos)
b) Game(rather Link to a nice virtual driving game by Zapak)
c) Community
d) Why Nano?
e) Booking Details

The website is quite informative and easy to navigate while the chat feature is either programmed or buggy. The site also has a forum which is slightly active and has no signs of involvement by officials from Tata.

2) Social Media:
There are definitely some efforts to use social media to market the car. Not sure if there’s an elaborate strategy behind it all but here’s what’s being done.

a) Blog:
nano_blog
Though it’s certainly a step in right direction but clearly it’s a semi baked and half hearted effort with just two posts on the blog(managing 71 and 20 comments respectively) and no official replies to the conversation.

b) Orkut:
Orkut is one of the most popular social networking platforms in India and thus an obvious choice to pitch. There’s a user profile for Nano which has a few pics and videos and has around 350 friends. Also, there’s a group dedicated to the care which has around 11,000 members. The group was started back in May, 08.

c) Facebook:
Facebook is also a top networking site amongst Indians and there are some attempts to market Nano here too. There’s a fan page for the car with about 6000 fans, a few videos and picture albums. Here again the interaction levels from company reps are quite low(if at all).

d) YouTube:
There’s also a YouTube channel for Tata Nano which has some 78 subscribers and has managed to generated more than 10,000 views on videos of the car.

3) Online Booking:
There was also a lot of buzz surrounding online bookings for the car, I am not sure if this idea was implemented on Tata Nano’s site but it did definitely generate a lot of excitement on the web in general.

4) Nano Game:
Tata Nano Game
As mentioned previously, the game by Zapak was a great move to spread word about the car and it seems to have really worked well in doing it’s job. There are a lot of claims that the game has been played millions of times since its launch. It’s a simple and easily accessible game, which anyone with a browser and internet connection can play.

5) Online Advertisements:
nano_ad_iciciThe blogosphere and indian media sites were inundated with ads for Tata Nano. The ads came in all shapes and sizes and were definitely noticed. Though not directly a part of marketing, it’s an important aspect of Nano’s promotional campaign.

Offline Marketing

1) Collaborations:
As a part of their strategy to avoid premium for booking Nano, Tata partnered with a few banks for releasing application forms. Though the reason behind the move was different, it did help a lot in marketing Nano as the banks used their resources to market their collaboration with Tata to attract more and more applicants. ICICI bank for example initiated a whole campaign to get noticed and spread the word. Icicibank.com had a banner ad on their home page for booking Nano, and also ran links inside the site for the same. Not only this, the banks hired extra part time staff to book the Car. Roping banks like ICICI and SBI helped in also offering loans for total payment of car and infact to surprise of sum Tata announced a bank interest on the applications for Nano which will be rejected in lucky draw.

2) Mall Promotions:
As is the case with most automobile companies, Tata too ran a series of promotional activites on Malls to get Nano in front of perspective buyers.

3) Leveraging Existing Infrastructure:
Tata, a giant brand that it is has also leveraged it’s umbrella groups to market Nano. Now you can find Nano <!– /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:””; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:36.0pt; mso-footer-margin:36.0pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –>

merchandise, application forms and demo cars in Tata Indicom,Titan, Croma and Westside stores. Tata Indicom is also offering a money-back offer with every application form.


4) TV
Though Tata didn’t invest heavily into TV commercials, they did get a few channels to use the word ‘nano’ instead of small wherever possible. For instance, instead of anchors saying ‘we’ll be back after a short break’ on TV channels, they’re saying, ‘We’ll be back after a nano break.’

These are some of the marketing campaigns/tactics that I could find about Tata Nano, if you think I’ve missed something, just drop a comment and I’ll update the post.

You can also download this post as a PDF  for future reference, Download

Internet campaign of BJP’s L.K Advani

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Blogosphere and Twitterville are abuzz with the news of recently launched blog of  prime ministerial candidate Mr L.K Advani of the India’s opposition party, BJP.  Be it the Obama effect or something else, it’s good to see Indian politicians starting to use Internet actively.  Clearly, BJP is coming out stronger and smarter when it comes to making their presence felt on the web as compared to the Congress.  Also, there seem to be an aggressive effort in marketing Mr Advani on the internet too. Lets see how Mr Advani and team are using various social media tools and services to spread the word.

1) Personal Web Site: The website http://www.lkadvani.in/ as Gaurav Mishra notes, was launched on November 8, 2008.  The site is much better than the kind of sites we’ve seen in the past . Not only does it look better, it is also well conceptualized(though there’s nothing out of the box yet).
Things worth noting about the site are
a)  Comprehensive about and background page(s): This is very important for those who want to know more about the leader and/or the party. That said, the site offers a lot of relevant information.

b) Forum: The site also has an active in house forum, with a couple of threads having more than 100 posts. Having a forum is very important to organize a loyal community around the social media object in question. If handled properly a forum like this could grow really big and attract lots of politics enthusiasts engaged in various sorts of discussions. What remains to be seen is if Mr Advani, himself takes part in this forum.

c)  Blog: A blog in another way to share your views/opinions and engage the community. A few questions that comes to one’s mind immediately are,  who writes the content ?  how open are they to feedback/criticism ? and who replies to the comments i.e engages in conversations ?
Since the blog is just a few days old, its difficult to answer these questions now.

d) Recent activities: It’s good to see, details about his standing and statements on currently relevant issues on the home page of the site.

e) Open to suggestions/feedback: There’s good enough and visible focus on asking for user feedback and suggestions. How they are dealt with it however is a separate issue.

f) Alerts: Email and SMS alerts about breaking news. Sharing things first with the community is a great thing to do and it gives people enough incentive to subscribe for these alerts.

g) Share with friends: The site also lets you invite your address book contacts and contacts from various social networks like Facebook, Orkut and LinkedIn.

2) Google Adwords Campaign: Though this doesn’t come under social media per se but there is also an active Google adwords campaign, not just for keyword search but also contextual advertising. Smartly enough they’ve even bought ads for keyword “congress”. So if someone searches Google for “congress” they’ll be seeing an ad like this

Some other keywords and phrases bought are “l k advani”, “lk advani” and bjp. Incidentally SBI folks are even smarter for they too bought ads for the keyword “l k advani”. Here’s what their contextual ad looks like


Apart from the above mentioned there also some properties on the web some of which might be official, like the Facebook fan page.

These are some of the aspects of Mr Advani’s internet campaign that I could discover. The campaign is focussed more on depth than on width for now and that’s the reason there’s a lot of focus on the website and almost zero focus on other social media tools. A couple of interesting and simple things they can do are

1) have videos of his speeches uploaded under an official youtube channel, so that more people can see them and know more about him and his viewss.
2) Have an option to vote for or against his stands on various issues. This could help them understand what’s the popular opinion for netizens about his stands.

Even if they decide to focus on just the site without doing anything fancy, they can get a lot of attention and earn goodwill by just spending more time conversing with the users/visitors.

Mr Advani’s experiments with the internet should serve as an example for other politicians from India, especially the younger ones and hopefully 2009 will see more politicos finding their way to the internet.

A good year !!

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I know its a bit late to be rambling about the year that was but given the fact that I was in hibernation for the last week or so, I have no option. More than anything, this post is a personal memoir for the year 2008 and what it had in store for me.

2008 has been a good year over all both personally and professionally(I am glad I still write in that order). I can vaguely remember how it all changed, from being just a regular software engineer cum web junkie working for one of the very few global web startups in India (Slideshare) to getting into social media, to co-founding kwippy and much more. It’s been a crazy, happening year with lots of learnings, relearnings and unlearnings. Some of the good things(online mostly) that happened to me in the last year

Kwippy: From a simple thought of archiving gtalk status messages to microblogging to conversations, Kwippy is most definitely the best thing that happened to me during the last year. It’s been really challenging and exciting playing different roles at different times, a front end developer, a customer service rep, a community manager, executive head and more. Talking about web apps is one thing, building an app is another and it’s this transition that teaches you a lot. Not only you get to experience things(and situations) first hand, you learn to appreciate things around a lot more. Kwippy will get to see a lot more action in days to come and I am really looking forward to the planned changes and improvements.

Blogging: I started blogging regularly this year only and have written 75 posts in total, which have  received  92 comments so far. Blogging, started as a hobby and is now a passion. Now it feels weird if I don’t blog for a few days and that urge to express my thoughts makes me sit through the night and scribble my thoughts. I’ve written quite a few event driven posts about Twitter off late, as the way I see things and I hope they are not taken in any other way. I plan to blog more regularly and stick to writing about business, marketing and social media mostly.

Reading: I started reading a lot, both online and offline this year. Its customary now to read at least a couple of blog posts daily. I became more regular with reading books(as opposed to just buying them) and magazines(primarily Tehelka).

Friends: Thanks to various social networking sites and startup related events, I’ve made some really nice friends over the last year and learnt lots of things from them. Hope things to continue being good in times to come.

While 2008 has been a good year, I hope this year brings on a lot more for everyone and leave us as better humans.