10 marketing campaigns on Valentine’s Day 2015 by Indian brands that you cannot afford to miss

Love is in the air and also all over the internet. Read how some of the Indian brands crafted their valentine's day campaign for 2015.

Festival Marketing has not been a new thing, as outlined by my earlier post. Although Valentine’s Day is not a festival in the traditional sense but it is one event that has always attracted a lot of attention for brands to promote their products and services. More so this year, with online marketing spends increasing and we enter the age of smart phone and increasing internet penetration Indian brands are going all out on making sure that Valentine’s Day make a dent in your heart or pocket with some or the other way by using their irresistible “Valentine’s Day” offers and answer “What does love mean to you?” in the most innovative way to win a contest or simply “Celebrate the month of love” not even one day.

For a heavy internet user like me who spends more than 10 hours every day accessing it, a lot of brands followed me with banners, emails, videos begging me to love more. Valentine’s Day campaigns by brands at the end of the day do sound cliché and run of the mill but advertising and marketing campaigns are beginning to get more content and story driven and not the usual hammering.

We look at 10 of those campaigns building up to Valentine’s day that made me sit up and some which were utterly disappointing. The campaigns mentioned are not in any particular order but were worth noticing in the midst of all cliché love stressing, stereotypical valentine offers coming from all sides in your news feed and inbox.

Share a Picture & Selfie Themed Campaigns

Brands like Chumbak, India Circus and Indigo who don’t spend a lot on offline marketing as much as they do on customer retention and repeat usage used email marketing as a way to promote themselves on Valentine’s day. While their main aim would be branding and introduce some of their brand philosophy and tone through these campaigns they used the most cliché thing to amplify their marketing efforts. “Let me ask them to take a selfie”

1. Chumbak – #pyaarVyaarcontest

Chumbak has a range of products that they wanted to promote under the pyaarVyaar hampers like many other brands in e-commerce who were making separate gifting sections on their portals. It was a good way to address both committed and singles to take part in this contest.

The contest was

I don’t think the contest connected with many people as I could see less than 20 people actually taking part in it on Facebook & Instagram with this hashtag.

2. India Circus – #selfiewithIndiacircus

The first basic thing that India circus faltered is creating a hashtag with their name in it. If selfie wasnt run of the mill enough for a brand like India circus which is not known, this was guaranteed to be a flop as you need to make your consumers love you first before forcing them to be loyalists and actually use your branded hashtags with their social media circle. Naturally, it didn’t work and I couldn’t find more than 2 mentions of this hashtag on Facebook and Twitter combined. Here are few more ways that brands are using hashtags these days.

3. Indigo – #LovedUp

For an airline brand the easiest thing to do is to run a contest and give away free tickets or excess discount. Indigo did just that but with a lot of simplicity. The competition required participants to use an extremely simple hashtag completely unrelated to the brand and share a selfie which couples anyway do on 14th Feb.

Although, the risk that it ran by using this hashtag was that it was a very generic one and could have been hijacked by any other brand to cash in on the contest’s popularity. However, a little search of this hashtag on twitter gave the proof that it worked well. Who would not follow a twitter account and post a selfie for return tickets to Goa.

Forget Valentine’s Day, let’s celebrate an entire week

We all know the popularity of the “Happy Page” on Instagram and Facebook, so Ferns & Petals came up with a similar campaign to celebrate an entire Valentine’s week. As if a day wasn’t enough to put pressure to do something “special” here’s presenting an entire week to spend money. Say hello to “consumerism“

4. Ferns & Petals – Valentine’s Week Celebration

Have a look at all the subject lines sent everyday to celebrate the “7 days of Love” and promised free delivery as well. So now we have Rose Day, Hug Day, Promise Day, Propose Day, Kiss Day and of course Valentines Day.

Ferns & Petals sent an email daily with their “Love is” campaign. However, the copy of all the campaigns was quite bland and uninteresting. Also, I am sure these emails were not sent to just the male audience in their database and still every email said something like below

If this email did go to their female users as well then either that is poor targeting or smart marketing expecting the women to send it to their partners.

Here is an example of one of the emails that they sent which was clubbed with a list of products that people could order.

Let’s now come to brands who went beyond emails, offers & selfies

Not all brands did the obvious this Valentine’s day. Some of them were quite innovative in communicating or professing their love to their consumers, while some tried a bit too hard. These campaigns tried leveraging social media in the way it’s supposed to be, creating or at least trying to create engaging stories in the hope that people will share.

5. FoodPanda – Write a love letter to your favorite food item

Now Zomato, already has quite occupied the space of “Love for Food” in the consumer’s mind with their exceptional content driven social media campaign. It would be difficult for a brand like FoodPanda with services similar to what Zomato might get into soon to acquire the same space. However, at the same time this space seems to be the only logical and high connect space for an online food ordering service to associate their brand with.

The contest in my opinion was quite innovative and a welcome change in the midst of all the “love is” and “post your selfie” and “express your love” campaigns.

It got foodpanda decent engagement as people started writing love letters to their favorite dishes.
Check the campaign here

6. Old Spice – #bestwingmanever

I have hardly come across brands, specially in India, who manage to use Facebook or the so-called “Social Media Strategy” seamlessly with their brand message. Brands either end up promoting their products or simply wish Happy Republic and Independence Day on their Facebook page in the name of social media marketing. So when a brand like Old Spice does something really cool on Valentine’s day, it’s worth looking at.

They came up with this beautiful campaign to reunite estranged couples and become the #bestwingmanever. Check out few of their creatives. The campaign chose the creatives very wisely adhering to Bollywood, football, news and tech fans.

Mumbai vs Delhi

Coke vs Pepsi

Check out other uploads of this campaign here

7. Your UBER Chopper is arriving Now

Now obviously we know the state of UBER in Delhi now. If they do anything close to ordinary like wishing “Happy New Year” on their Facebook page they would get nothing but backlash. People are still outraged and UBER either needs to take baby steps toward building their brand and gaining confidence or do something like starting a chopper service. They did the latter and my Marwari brain says that the deal was a steal.

interested in a helicopter?

This is campaign is exactly what happens when the product and marketing team put their minds together to give consumers something they just cannot refuse. Now who would say no to a helicopter ride, aerial view of Delhi, with a pool side meal for two and pick up and drop in Uber Black all for Rs. 5000. I wished I had a valentine in Delhi when I read this email.

8. Flipkart found its valentine! – #Flipheart

Although, the hashtag does not make any sense at all, the video is a heartwarming, humble and seemingly genuine video. Here is a perfect example where brands can afford to use their brand name in hashtag or a part of it because they have loyalists who would love to be associated with it.

The video connected well with the audience and Flipkart Social Media team would have met the KRA of increasing positive mentions in the social media circles for the month of February with this campaign.

Check out the responses to #FlipHeart 

9. Durex – #50gamestoplay

Well how can this brand stay away from the limelight on valentine’s day specially when it has gone out and said that their condom sales increase by 25% on 14th feb when compared to the usual days.

Durex, with Ranveer Singh already on board has become a progressive brand and has gone out to propagate to not shy over sex. It’s like Flipkart saying shop more, or Zomato saying eat more, it completely makes sense for Durex to surround their positioning around “love, sex, durex” and associate their product with a rewarding sex life.

This time around, they created a microsite and used popular culture and hype of 50 shades of grey to create #50gamestoplay each of which would eventually lead to sex.

In my opinion, this was a very good campaign, seamless integrated with valentine’s day celebrations, stating the obvious that you are anyway going to have sex, might as well let us go out there and announce it on how you can spice things up.

Check out their microsite which lists down #50gamestoplay on Valentine’s day – http://50gamestoplay.durex.com/

10. Hero Motocorp – Hero Pleasure #BeFree

To end this post, is an utterly disappointing campaign by a brand that has come up with legendary campaigns before. The video is too much drama, completely unrealistic, too high on histrionics, tries too hard, fails at delivering the message and does not show either the brand as an enable or the protagonist to be free at the end of the video. A complete fail of a campaign and very depressing.

There were a lot of other brands who jumped on the valentine’s day frenzy, however these were the campaigns that actually induced a love or hate feeling with me. So going by the mood of the day, I hope you liked some post and Hook, Line & Clincher is not going to stay behind in asking you to show some love to share the post or website with your friends who might be interested in this content.

Thank you for reading.