Holidays, events, festivals, special days and other such opportunities have always been used by brands for promotional campaigns or dedicated marketing communications surrounding those days. Read here about how ecommerce brands celebrated holi with indian consumers online.

This happens because consumers in general are more receptive to offers, jokes, wishes during those days. Keeping this aside it also gives a brand a personality rather than it being considered as a business entity. That is why it becomes a special piece of communication and establishes a connect when brands email you saying “they have missed you”, when they remember your “likes and dislikes”, when they remember your birthdays.

April Fool’s Day is one such days where brands go all out to joke, fool their consumers and have a good laugh over it. Let’s see some of the many April Fool’s Day 2014 pranks by Indian online brands.

There is also an article debating whether April Fools’ Day helps a brand.

Flipkart introduces a new service called #FlipTraveller

flipkart april fool prank

To me it looked like a model worth giving a thought 😛

To me the crowd sourced logistic system looked another brilliant brainwave by Flipkart but when you fall for the prank and click on the link given by them to apparently avail the “all expense paid trip” in exchange of their delivery it takes you to a page of an e-book that you can download for free called “A Fool’s Journey”. This was very smartly done by Flipkart rather than coming up with a “Happy April Fool’s Day” landing page.

flipkart april fool day prank

Oh! April Fools? Okay

ixigo to launch an executive class rickshaw service

Watch the ixigo april fool video here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe6cI5REP-0

The video is very well made and a decent idea made to look somewhat believable on the first go. Towards the end, the video tells you the cities that it’s going to be launched in and takes you to a page which looks like below. The landing page could have been way better than the current which comes with a mediocre post it note and horrible background. But overall, a nice campaign.

ixigo April Fool

Snapdeal takes it’s April Fool joke way too seriously

Snapdeal.com went one step further for it’s April Fool’s Day joke. They launched an actual website called www.snapdealmatrimony.in and promoted on their facebook page, created videos and even the making of the prank. Check below.

snapdeal.com april fool joke matrimony

When you actually go on the website, the homepage required you to choose 3 option to finally see the match from their exhaustive database. The options were quite sexist for both the sexes, but it’s all for the humor.

Snapdeal.com april fool matrimony joke

When you finally select 3 options, it starts some sort of counter and tells you that it has found the perfect match for you, after which you click on “Know More” button to land on the April Fool page.

snapdeal april fool matrimony

So much for April Fool? Are you sure?

They even created video testimonials like these

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFU7_UFeP0A

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e76Ck60H_xQ

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CN7FBhxz1Ao

and then created a making of the entire thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kC7sQW08sM

I wish I could speak to someone from the Snapdeal team behind this campaign to get more detailed insights on the effort that went behind executing this. It would also be interesting to know the kind of buzz that they created and how did they evaluate this whole exercise.