Competitor Yahoo did it last year with its famous 'YOU' campaign on television, to showcase its revamped features and email service. Last month, Google joined the game on prime time TV with its "The Web is What You Make of it" campaign.Google's reason is simple: your product may have the best of features, but if you have to succeed in India, you have to showcase the emotional and personal connections that people have with the web today.
There may be other reasons as well for the new promotion strategy. According to Stat Counter, a web analytics firm, Microsoft's Internet Explorer leads the market in India with 40 per cent market share, followed by Mozilla Firefox at 32 per cent with Google's Chrome trailing at third place with a market share of about 23 per cent.
Nikhil Rungta, country marketing head, Google India, says the campaign is to highlight what the chrome browser delivers to internet users.
"It's intuitive and seamlessly connects to Google's products like YouTube, blogs, emails, pictures etc. We intend to highlight the ease of use with Chrome browser to Indian users who may have not switched or seen our browser."
The company will also run promotional videos online to popularise its browser and related online products.
Rungta says the TV campaign is the culmination of a marketing exercise that began last year. The company invited Google users to share their stories on how internet made a difference to their lives.
At the same time, Google also took to promoting Chrome through billboards and newspaper advertisements. Google Creative Lab, an in-house creative agency, worked with ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) on the campaign, the brief being to show how Chrome is fast and simple and designed to help you make the most of the modern web.
In the next few months, Indian TV viewers will see several real-life stories on how the web has changed the lives of the 100