Riding on the coattails of superheroes

In a world where e-commerce companies offering daily deals are a dime-a-dozen, it is very difficult for a company to create an impact in its consumers’ minds. It was interesting when I got a call from Crazeal, the India unit of Groupon Inc. USA, about a branding exercise that involved a screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. Now, the Batman is probably the darkest and definitely my favourite mainstream superhero, but establishing a link between Crazeal and its customers inIndia seemed a little far-fetched. Even for him.

Crazeal had other ideas. They partnered with cinemas across nine cities and bought out one screening of TDKR in each of the movie theatres for the evening of July 22, a Sunday. They then offered those tickets at a 50 percent discount to customers who logged on to their site. A total of 3,500 tickets were on sale. The sale opened at 8 pm on July 18, and Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad sold out in three hours. Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Jaipur,Chandigarh and Pune took a little longer but there were no tickets left after July 19.

“People will remember that they got to see a movie that no one else could get tickets for at half the rate because of Crazeal,” says Ankur Warikoo, CEO, Crazeal. “It’s easy for an Internet portal to get lost and it’s very rare for an Internet company to come face to face with its consumers. This event helped us do both,” he added.

The PVR hall at Phoenix Mills in Mumbai was full of excited fans, many dressed in Batman tees, who couldn’t help telling everyone around that they got tickets at half-price. It didn’t matter that all of them had the same story to tell. The only branding that PVR had was Crazeal. There were no trailers of other movies before the main screening; the screen just played Crazeal ads. “At the end of it there is a little bit of net expense because it is marketing. Here, we can measure return on investment,” says Warikoo.

Crazeal ran a pilot with another superhero movie, The Amazing Spiderman, in PVR Priya, Delhi. They blocked an entire show on a Friday evening and sold tickets at half rate. The tickets sold out in 30 hours. “We ride with anything that has a national presence and strong target audience connect. Spiderman ran on a Saturday, Batman on a Sunday. Would we have run Batman a week after its release? No. It’s a cult movie. We are riding on the popularity of a strong brand,” he says.

It’s not the first time that Crazeal has tried a gimmick like this to establish a connect with its consumers. A couple of months back, anyone walking into a CCD outlet was given a menu card that said if you texted your e-mail id to a number you would get a mobile voucher that entitled you to a free cappuccino. The cappuccino had Crazeal branding on top that was created with a stencil.

Crazeal didn’t go beyond the pilot because scaling it across the country involved a lot of operational challenges. “We’ve gone back to the drawing board now,” says Warikoo.

But online customers are a notoriously fickle lot. One good experience does not mean loyalty. Even twenty good experiences cannot guarantee it. It was confirmed by a young couple that bought tickets from Crazeal. “It’s not as if we are only going to buy tickets from Crazeal. We’ll search for the best offers online. But yeah, Crazeal will be the first website we check.” I guess that’s the best Ankur and co. can hope for. Unless, of course, they can get the Batman to force consumers to buy from Crazeal.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.