Tag: zomato

  • Brands, Activism & Morality

    A while back, someone had joked on Twitter that by 2025, babies will be born outraged. But in 2020, the joke, at least in Indian advertising, is that when the Tanishq brand manager begins to think of a campaign, #BoycottTanishq starts trending. When I was writing the article on brands and empathy for Business Insider, I realised it would need a lot of effort for brands to go beyond signalling.

    However, with inequities becoming even more of a pressing topic, and the expectation from brands to be active participants in society – activism to action, is there an inevitable movement that we will see? And hence, this post on brands through the prism of activism and morality, from the perspectives of a consumer and a brand marketer, and the safety of an armchair.

    “We are living in an era of woke capitalism in which companies pretend to care about social justice to sell products to people who pretend to hate capitalism.”

    Clay Routledge
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  • Changing brandscapes

    Recently, I was part of an interesting round table discussion organised by afaqs and IBM around “Technology in Marketing“. While we did stick to the subject, in my mind, I was also wondering about the impact this (topic) was  having on the idea of brand. It has been only 4 years since I had last held a brand job, (I left TOI in 2010) but I can safely say that the landscape has changed massively. A few thoughts –

    Time: The cycles of brand building have been massively reduced. This is not a 2010 phenomenon, but to give you some perspective, in that year Flipkart was just venturing beyond books and hardly the well known brand it is now. Zomato was a ‘promising startup’ according to a list made by the Smart Techie magazine and had just expanded beyond a single city. The flip side is that some of the other startups in that list no longer exist. AlooTechie, which reported this, also does not exist. I had a Nokia E series phone then, and they are pretty much a non entity now. In short, that word – change, and it’s faster than ever! It is said that brands get built over time, but do business cycles allow that liberty now?

    Geography: A cliche used frequently is “Geography is history”, but a little incident reminded me that it may not altogether be true. One of the regular conversations these days is around taxi rentals and Uber is a favourite among many of my friends. I casually asked them whether they knew of the heavy rap Uber was getting in the US for remarks allegedly made by a senior VP. (alternate perspective) They didn’t, and it isn’t as though they don’t consume news online. They missed it amidst all the ‘noise’. While a brand may be global, how much does its international stature impact regional preferences, even in this hyper connected era?

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  • Food for the soul

    Thanks to Zomato, I got to spend some bak bak time with Mayur back in February. Along with Rocky, this guy gets to do the two things I’d rather do always – eat and travel. While it was a fun meet up, it was impossible to agree on the subject of meat. Most of the others around were fanatical carnivores – like myself (and I was wearing a tee with the message above) – so we traded insults with him for the first few minutes before the man silenced us with “food is like religion, and you should not piss on other people’s temples”.

    After that the conversation quickly moved to life philosophy. I (along with at least one other person) was curious to know how he kept himself interested in the food + travel routine. Wouldn’t it get monotonous? We talked of retaining child-like levels of curiosity and wonder, an openness to experiences, of starting the day asking what newness can be done today and realised that as we grow older, we look for reasons not to do things, as opposed to the reverse.

    After taking my trip with a food quote, (and underlining his instant wit) he went off to talk to other folks, and the rest of discussed how this also translates to how we interact with other people. Earlier, we used to trust others until they gave us a reason not to, and these days, it’s exactly the reverse. I wondered if this is probably related to the ‘openness to experiences’ we had talked of earlier.  (more…)

  • Create and curate

    Yay! Instagram launched web profiles, and mine, as you can see, is dominated by food! Which meant that I was completely blown by what Zomato did with the Instagram API at Zomato.xxx. If you haven’t seen it yet, now would be a good time. Try to have a full meal before you take a look. One of the bugs in this version is that it makes people hungry. I don’t see them fixing that bug soon! 😉

    It’s not really an original thought, since I’ve seen at least one fashion brand use hashtags on  Instagram and Twitter to generate photos, but that doesn’t really take away anything, since the execution is extremely good.

    I wrote about the reemergence of branded content last week. One way is to create your own content, the scalability of which is debatable, unless that is one of the organisation’s core competency and priority. The other way is curation. Like I have mentioned on the blog before, curation is a great way for brands to engage with content producers and at the same time, provide  great content to those who consume it. It’s not really creation vs curation, but more of their respective share in the strategy.

    On the execution front, crowdsourcing works best if you make it as easy as possible for the for the content producer. In Zomato’s case, adding a #zomato to the food snaps I load on Instagram is hardly a task. The simpler the task is, and the more it is an add-on behaviour than a new one, the lesser the need for incentive. The cooler it is, the more people would want to be a part of it. It distributes itself.

    In a traditional media dominated era, more money was spent on distribution than creation. Now content is marketing and with owned platforms, and earned and ‘sponsored’ media on social platforms, the costs of distribution have fallen. There’s a lot being written about content strategy for brands from a creation perspective, but the costs of distribution fall even further in curation because content creators would want to show off their work. The hope is that brands will spend at least a part of the money they’re saving, into creating platforms, processes, tools etc that make it easy for the user to create and share ‘branded’ content.

    until next time, co-curation is for later 🙂

  • Restaurant Guide 2012 – Zomato gets real!

    Since Zomato has made a smart strategic decision in Bangalore – moved to the food bowl of the city – Koramangala, I only had to walk a bit to get this one. 🙂

    A bit of an intro before we talk about the guide. My affection for Zomato – from the time I tried their app – has been documented in early 2011 on my other blog. They’ve come a long way since then – on design, scale across domains, and funding. The first 2 have been shared with the crowd, the last, unfortunately not. 😉 At a very rough level, there are two things that I feel are the pillars for a venture like this – content and ‘technology’ (user experience, database, back-end infrastructure etc) – for it to truly become a great community, and I know at least one person in each of these areas at Zomato who are extremely good at their job. Karthik on food, and Pankaj on the rest. (Disclosure: I have to be nice to them because I’d really like to get my hands on the 2013 food guide early too! ;)) Ok, enough about them, let’s talk about the guide.

    Regular users of Zomato would automatically notice the consistency of symbols used. But the really interesting part is the navigation. The guide not only has quick reckoners based on cuisine type, but also provides a mood/occasion based quick reference where it covers  (for example) girls night out, romantic dinner etc. The other part where it scores is the utility angle – so it has notables, (how many times has a visiting friend asked you which is the must-visit place in Bangalore) Sunday brunch, (I consider this a personal favour based on the queries I have received on this one!) late nighters (thankfully I don’t get these, but I have no doubts on its usefulness) and so on. (more…)