It’s raining discounts and practically everything is on ‘Sale’, except probably Trivortex bangles! At Myntra, we’ve been having an ‘I Love Sale’ campaign running since January. While we have been tweeting about it since then, last week we decided to take the relationship to the next level. The #ReplaceMovieTitlesWithSale turned out to be a huge success for us, and I’ve chronicled the details on our corporate blog.
Since there were many interesting answers, I even tweeted about it from my personal account, a rare occurrence. I was asked by a couple of people why we chose the cliched hashtag, and I thought this would be a good time to convey my version beyond a few multiples of 140 characters.
I’ve always been a staunch believer of figuring out intent before anything else and it driving everything else. In that sense, I still stick to my earlier stance on hashtags, but it’s more nuanced now, because I begin to understand the kind of roles it can play in a brand’s framework. As the perfect example, in this case, our objective was simple – create a buzz around the sale at Myntra. We could have tried a more ‘critically acclaimed’ hashtag, like #bachpanstyle, but our intent was reach, and the more ‘banal’ it was, the higher its chances of usage. And boy, it worked – generated more than 7000 tweets in 3 hours, and not only was it a #1 trending topic in India, it also touched a worldwide #2. Mission pretty much accomplished.
Zooming outward a bit. I like to think that I’m a social purist, to the extent that I request people not to use social and media as though they are doomed to be married to each other. There are so many things that are social and not media, at least yet! However, social media is a reality, or rather, social is also media. In fact, this is what marketers can instinctively relate to, because it can be viewed in the same paradigms of reference that they have been used to in traditional media. It can also, unfortunately be ‘bought’ – from Promoted Tweets/Followers to Promoted Stories and Page Like Ads. The purist in me lives by not doing this.
However, if I approached all of my assignment as a purist and argued that this is only a long term game and numbers don’t really matter, I’d probably be raised to sainthood in future, but my job would have died long before that! In essence, I need to be pragmatic, and run the sprint and the marathon. My intent decides what I should be running and when. It’s a balance, and one that needs to be worked at every day. If I asked you about the 100m sprint record holder, you’d probably do the pose in a second, but if I asked you the same about marathons…. In general, that holds true for social activities as well. After all, it’s real time, and is a nascent domain in which we have seen very few marathons. 🙂
In summation, the whole world is on sale, and another sale is not really a news maker. But the sprint can help, by adding a layer that helps this sale stand out. Thanks afaqs and Lighthouse Insights. 🙂
until next time, now running
The truth of the matter is that no one likes advertising. As marketeers, we need to accept that. If you speak to someone in a way the actors in ads speak, they will run away.
The reason these banal hashtags are popular is because this is how most of us speak offline too. We are constantly creating terrible puns. Silly hashtags give us the creative license to go overboard — and celebrate in.
You seem to be justifying your actions here. Trust me — I have done more trending activities than I can remember — there is no end to the naysayers.
Hmm, depends on how we define advertising. There are many awesome pieces of content that I like/can relate to, and which happen to be ads. Relevant, interesting etc etc. Also, exaggeration is a key device in storytelling.
I’m not sure of the punning either because most of our other hashtags have had nothing to do with wordplay.
I am my own audience when writing – as in, my thoughts become clearer to me when I write. Don’t know if it came across as justification. 😀 Unintended. The naysayers in this case were more curious than naysayers per se. But yes, I totally understand that that’s not usually the case! 🙂
PS: Good to see you around 🙂