Dotcom Marketing in India

The Dotcom Marketing Mania Contd...

For instance, hungama.com, completely ignored the expensive print and television media and took up viral marketing. It identified 125 hungama hangouts – pubs, clubs, and cinema halls – where it made its presence felt through promotions, schemes, and onsite advertising. Neeraj Roy, CEO hungama, said, "We wanted to be present at places where youngsters hang out." Similarly, bharatplanet.com, a gifting site, ran a referral program wherein by introducing friends the visitors to this site earned points, which were redeemable as shopping vouchers. Through referrals alone, the site got about 600 new users a week. Word of mouth advertising, which resulted from a loyal customer base over a period of time, was responsible for around 30% of new site traffic.

Hence, dotcoms had many cash and non-cash incentives for their loyal customers. For instance, a consultancy company e-lab, gave cash incentives to the user for references forwarded to its site, sawaal.com, a search engine, gave free T-shirts to the users who sent information about the site to 20 e-mail addresses.

The companies also used other established portals for advertising. Such advertising was based on click-through rate; that is the dotcom had to pay for the traffic that reached it after clicking on the advertisement. This lowered the advertising costs and also ensured focused traffic. For instance, many new dotcoms offering gift services to the NRIs used the regional language newspaper sites like andhraprabha.com (Telugu), or dinamani.com (Tamil).

Some dotcoms even reverted back to the barter system for their advertising needs. Shares had become a new currency in the dotcom industry. Many dotcoms signed agreements with popular media players to buy advertising space and time through the issue and allotment of shares. For instance, Business Standard, a financial daily, entered into a share-and-cash agreement with Pugmarks. Under the agreement, Business Standard was to use Pugmarks' services for hosting and maintenance of the site in exchange for providing free advertisement space and cash payments. A contests site, contests2win, also entered into an agreement, to host the URL on the partners hoarding.

Marketing or Publicity?

Many analysts felt that the dotcom marketing methods lacked originality (Refer Exhibit II for ideas for marketing sites). One of the reasons seemed to be that the dotcoms were always in a hurry. The minimum time of more than a month required to create an ad for an FMCG product seemed to be too long in the fast-changing dotcom industry. Ashish Dhawan, Chryslis Capital, a venture capitalist said, "You can't blame them. Most advertising agencies like most lawyers or investment banks are still learning the dotcom business." Also, not many companies had done a pre-launch research and there was no secondary knowledge available. Analysts also felt that most dotcom entrepreneurs were using marketing methods more suited to old economy businesses.

Dotcom Marketing in India - Next Page >>>

Case Details

Case Code : ITSY006
Themes: e-Business
Case Length : 08 Pages
Period : 1990-2001
Organization : Equus Advertising, Hungama.com
Pub Date : 2002
Teaching Note : Available
Countries : India
Industry : Information Technology (Electronic Commerce)

Free Case Studies

Business Strategy
Finance
HRM
Insurance
IT and Systems
Marketing
Operations
Leadership
More Case Studies >>

Micro Case Studies

Business Environment
Finance
Business Strategy
Human Resource Management
IT and Systems
Marketing
Operations
Micro Case Studies >>

Free Resources

Micro Case Studies
Free Case Studies
Articles
Interviews
Book Reviews
Glossary
Online Quiz
More Free Resources >>

Case Related Links

Best Selling Case Studies
Business Case Studies
Learning With Case Studies
Cases Used in Textbooks
Prize Winning Case Studies
More Case Studies >>

Case Studies and Management Resources

Asia's Most Popular Collection of Management Case Studies