The Art of Reverse Marketing

Just like Reverse Engineering is dismantling an already built structure to carefully observe and study the work to utilize it for your engineering purposes. Reverse Marketing works on the same principle. This technique is really about observing the work of the best marketers of the world and studying their work to learn about their intent from the stories and from the strategies that they launch. In most marketing techniques, the observation is made mostly from the consumer's lens but, in this technique, the observation is made from the marketer's lens. Just as the famous quote says," A fool learns from his mistake, but a genius learns from the mistakes of others.” This is what defines Reverse Marketing. We carefully observe the Reverse marketing strategies to define what works and what does not work in the field of marketing.

We are now gonna take a look at one of the Amazon ads and break down what the business objective was, who the viewers of that ad were, and what were the associated communication challenges.

Amazon (Aur dikhao) Reverse marketing strategies

Remember the Amazon jingle of Amazon,” Aur dikhao, aur dikhao.” This jingle literally got stuck into our minds. Now, let’s break down this campaign and understand how amazon created a position in the head of the Indian Audience.

Business Objective

The first step in the Reverse Marketing technique is always to identify what was the business objective of the brand team that had launched this campaign. The business objective is the source of growth that the brand team envisions. A useful place to start is the growth equation, which looks something like this (Market x Penetration x Frequency x Average weight of consumption), assuming the price is constant.

You multiply all of these and get the size of the brand or the size of the category. 

The reason this equation is used is that it narrows down the objective to one of three possibilities: whether the brand is trying to drive Penetration, they are trying to increase the buying Frequency of the consumers, or they are trying to drive more Average Weight of Purchase.

This campaign of amazon is clearly a penetration campaign. When this campaign was launched, Amazon had very less market share compared to Flipkart. So, they tried to attract people to their platform by offering choice. Now, we have to understand whether Amazon was going for a category Penetration, i.e., is Amazon talking to the consumer who has never used an E-commerce platform before or is it talking about brand penetration which is, is amazon talking to the user who is already using one of the Amazon’s competitor platform, and grab users from there. When we look at the ad closely, we can make an argument for both of these.

The primary benefit that Amazon is offering is virtually unlimited choices, but they could be making a pitch to the user, saying that look we have two crore products, which when compared to your current service provider, is almost double as they have listed only one crore product on their platform. Therefore go ahead and choose us, or they might be talking to the user who is only shopping offline and saying, look, we have two crore products, the shops that you are going to have a few thousand products, therefore choose us. Now, if we want a conclusive answer to this, we can take a look at the previous campaign that Amazon launched just before this one. Well, this ad campaign supported the idea of brand penetration.

But in the “aur dikhao” campaign, we can see that all sorts of people are visible in the ad. It defines that amazon shifted its focus from attracting audiences who were already shopping online to the people who were new to this concept.

Target Audience

What if I told you that each citizen of India who has access to the internet is the target audience of Amazon. Shocked? Let me explain in the campaign it is visible that Amazon is covering every part of the society, from a working individual to a husband, parent, elderly, joint family people living in tier 2, tier 3 cities, students, everyone has been covered in the ad indicating that Amazon has some or the other thing for every Indian citizen, despite their demography, geography, psychography, and behaviors.

One of the main focuses of this ad is the variety that they are offering on their website, and the whole ad continuously showcases that over 2 crore products are available on Amazon. Ok, let’s understand it by one more example, have you ever seen an ad for Dominos. In most of the ads, their prime focus is always family and friends. It is because pizza is a portion of comfort food. People like to enjoy it when they are relaxing with their friends and family, but when you look at the ad on Amazon, you cannot figure out whom they are targeting. Well, this is because I told you earlier, Amazon’s prime focus is everyone with a smartphone. They not only want to target people who are already shopping online, but they even focus on the people who prefer to shop the traditional way.

Communication Challenge

Communication challenge is defined as the behavior and mindset that you are trying to change in your target consumer. It captures the liver that the brand manager has to tingle in the consumer's psyche, such that the business achieves its business objectives. To frame a communication challenge, you first need to identify what the existing mindset and behavior of the consumer are concerning your brand. Now you have to identify what is that one thing that you want to convince your target audience of for Amazon's “aur dikhao” campaign. You could frame the communication challenge as follows, ”Convince users that Amazon has over two crore options on their platform.”

Let’s understand the context here, Amazon is the clear number two in the market at the starting of 2015, because at the moment Flipkart was ruling the e-commerce business in India, and while Amazon has decided to drive category penetration and to speak to new users you have never used any e-commerce, the new user tends to play safe and go with the number one option. Now, if Amazon tries to convince the new users to start using e-commerce, the user might go with the number one in the market. Now to attract the customer to their platform, Amazon has to convenience the new users why specifically Amazon for e-commerce. If I frame the campaign in such a way, that choice is an essential part of a delightful shopping experience. Now your Kirana store is offering just a few hundred products, Flipkart offers you one crore products, amazon is offering you over two crore products. So the consumer who is never settled or is ready to compromise their wide range of choices will be automatically attracted to Amazon.

Conclusion

Reverse marketing could be an essential part of your marketing strategy because when you are framing a new marketing strategy, you cannot be sure if the strategy is going to work or not, but by studying the already framed strategies and campaigns of the top marketers, we could get the gist of what works and what does not. Although, reverse marketing does not guarantee you success if you study the strategies closely and use them smartly, your chances of success increase.

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