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Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
Faith, perseverance, hard work and common sense are essential for an entrepreneur to succeed, believes Surjendu Kuila. After working with start-ups in Silicon Valley, he is back in India with an innovative start-up.
"The vibrancy, enthusiasm and the risk-taking abilities of the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley instilled a lot of confidence in me. India is a country replete with opportunities. In any walk of life, there is a major problem to solve. So I decided ot test my analytical abilities and business acumen in the brand building exercise in a unique manner," says Kuila, an IIT-IIM alumni, who spent most of his professional life in the US.
The freedom to work and execute ideas, solve daily challenges and create wealth made him join hands with another technology veteran Neeraj Jain to start Brandandme.com, an innovative platform which engages users with brands. Neeraj is a first generation entrepreneur with 10 years of experience in software, financial services and other industries. Their site, Brandandme.com uses quizzing and social conversation to increase brand familiarity. Kuila talks about how innovative methods like quizzing can educate users about brands and deliver amazing results.Click NEXT to read on
Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
Neeraj and I have been following the Internet industry for the last 10 years. While brainstorming on various ideas, the concept of brand engagement seemed interesting. We realised that online media agencies are facing problems and Brandandme could solve it.
The traditional media -- television and print -- is intrusive, expensive, non-interactive, immeasurable and non-engaging.
The evolution of online medium has transmogrified into various delivery modes. The industry started with CPM - Cost per mile. CPM is just like an inventory sell which provides absolutely no engagement. For CPM, click through rate is 1 per cent, which created problems such as banner blindness and intrusiveness.
The industry realised that it has to give more value to the advertisers. Just eyeballs wouldn't matter and hence the industry moved towards CPC - Cost per click. However, the problems still persisted.
Bounce rate became too high and the average time spent on the website became lesser. As a consequence, industry then moved on to CPL - Cost per Lead.
Today, the industry is moving toward actual engagement and advertisers are asking ad-networks and media buying agencies to come up with innovative platforms and various other engagement models.
Our platform is a disruptive way of bringing users and brands together in the form of a tight engagement unlike any of its predecessors - CPC, CPM or CPA (Cost per Action).
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Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
Consumers always perceive advertising as intrusive and non-desirable. Advertisers have no medium which provides undivided user attention, brand user engagement, enough media space to promote brands and inexpensive channel of promotion.
Brandandme.com is an innovative brand engagement platform which provides brands an incomparable engagement with users. This platform uses innovative quizzing and social conversation to engage the users with brands.
This platform uses innovative quizzing and social conversation to engage the users with brands.
Through this platform, brands would get undivided attention of users, a superlative engagement, and an entire clutter free online real estate for an inexpensive price and in-depth analytics.
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Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
The concept works in a very simple fashion but the repercussions are extremely powerful.
We focus on 'One Brand per Day'.
Each day a new brand promotes itself through plain vanilla content, interactive videos and images.
The participants have to answer questions about the brand. The questions are based on the content provided and not from prior general knowledge.
A winner is declared every day and the brand rewards the winner with a tangible gift worth Rs 1,500.
Remaining users accrue points at every stage of engagement with the brand. Points can be redeemed against exciting gifts.
As part of the engagement, the participants provide feedback about the brand which are then sent to the brands and made public on the brand conversation page.
On an average, users stay on Brandandme website for more than 8 minutes and on the engagement page for more than 2 minutes. The brands use these 2 minutes to capture a memory footprint.
Every day, we view around 1,000 advertisements of various brands and hence brand recall is virtually zero. We tell the brands to use these 2 minutes to tell users about the product effectively.
Apart from the branding perspective, through Brandandme we provide the brands insightful feedbacks, brand advocates, hot leads, product critiques, free CPC, free facebook likes and much more.
The site was launched on April 15, 2011 and since then we have already given away prizes worth Rs 25,000. In our platform everyone is a winner!
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Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
The opportunity is huge as we have close to 77,000 brands in India itself. And fortunately everyone wants to promote. However, the advertising budget on digital is a meagre 3 per cent of the total advertising pie making it an Rs 800 crore (Rs 8 billion) market in India. Fortunately, in the coming years the digital spend is going to grow at a rate of 150 per cent.
We are not focused only on the Indian market. We have already tied up with a Canadian ad network to open up our platform internationally.
The brands pay us money for the branding and engagement campaigns. Our revenue model is simple - We charge the advertisers only per engagement.
Our pricing is also innovative and cost effective. We follow CPE - Cost per engagement. Currently engagement is defined by us as someone who logs on to brandandme.com, engages with the brand in the form of interactive quiz.
We charge the advertisers only for the number of users who have taken the particular brand quiz.
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Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
Brands/advertisers would get undivided attention from users, a superlative engagement, and an entire clutter free online real estate for an inexpensive price and in-depth analytics. I reiterate, we focus on 'One Brand A Day'.
You never go to facebook or any other web portals to view an advertisement. You go there to network and read content. Throwing up an advertisement here is intrusive to many; however, the industry calls it a 'Pull Factor'.
Our USP is simple. There is no other purpose of a user to come to Brandandme but to engage with the brands.
How effective is this medium for advertising?
This is a very effective medium. The ultimate goal of marketers these days is to establish the brands in the customer's mind and get a "top of the mind brand recall". Now, with the plethora of ads that we see every day to be exact 1000 as per Neilson report how can 'brand recall' be achieved?
We promise 2 minutes of undivided user attention. The participants know that unless they answer the questions correctly they would not win. This platform is a self-selecting platform more on the lines of 'SocialVibe' and we call it an 'appointment advertising platform'.
We also promise that for someone who has taken the quiz, the brand would be on top of the mind in that particular category. We have given amazing insights to the brands we have tied up with.
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Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
We have over 12,000 registered users in just a month. We are growing with 100 users per day. We all have done quizzing at some stage in our lives. These days all the entrance exams are all multiple choice questions.
So, we all are familiar with the concept and the delivery mechanism. For us, it is all about promoting properly. Due to fund constraints we are not able to tell the world of our existence, though we have innovatively promoted ourselves well.Now think about the options a marketer has on digital: Google SEO 140 characters, 300X400 ads on Facebook or any other digital asset. In such a short space/online real estate how can you communicate your message effectively? It is impossible.
In our platform we give an entire microsite to the brands an entire page where the brand has all the liberty to promote itself through 4-5 paragraphs of text, a video and a bunch of images. We entice the users to click on the brands website, provide feedback about the brands, and visit the facebook page of the brands and many more.
Once a user has associated with a brand for few minutes, taken the pain to answer questions correctly and provided feedback, his loyalty towards the brand would definitely increase. Engagement would increase brand loyalty for sure.
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Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
We have received interesting responses from users and brand managers.
"This is really an innovative idea. It will definitely give the brands a new direction and dimension which probably print or electronic media couldn't offer. Also it provides lot more information about the brand especially through the quiz."
"It's a genuinely good site. Answer questions and get gifts, brilliant for quiz takers. More than that it's an astonishingly brilliant platform for brands to engage with consumers and let them know about their products. I got to know about Reebok Reezig better with Brandandme"
"The quizzes are the most happening thing. These quizzes actually force someone to know about a product and brand even if a person might not be interested. I would have never bothered to check about today's product if I was not made to answer."
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Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
There is a stark difference between what other contest sites do and what we do. The biggest distinction is that we remove clutter.
On other contest sites you have 100 quizzes running based on general knowledge.
Here, we focus on 'one brand a day', ask questions based on the content provided by the brand. The creatives are provided by brand.
We believe on 'quintessential brand engagement' as users spend on an average 2 minutes on the page.
This is an inexpensive channel of promotion; which no other contest sites can even claim to offer. Apart from this, we also provide the brands insightful feedbacks, brand advocates, hot leads, product critiques, free CPC, free facebook likes and much more.
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Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
We rely on MGM (Member get Member) marketing and other viral campaigns to attract users.
We are also looking at partnerships with existing companies to increase our user base drastically. Instead of re-inventing the wheel we believe in piggybacking.
How do you think is your innovation useful to the customers?
Consumers always perceive advertising as intrusive and non-desirable. Advertisers have no medium which provides undivided user attention, brand user engagement, enough media space to promote brands and inexpensive channel of promotion.
Through our platform advertisers find out many things in a jiffy - operational issues, customer complaints, brand advocates, hot leads, product problems, supply chain issues etc.
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Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
User acquisition is a generic problem. Howsoever innovative ideas you devise, user acquisition and retention would be a problem. We face problems which are more generic in nature for an Internet company.
What is the potential of the social networking sites in terms of advertising?
Even before our launch we started our Facebook campaign and were able to attract more than 5,000 fans.
However, the problem with any social networking site is the puny real estate it can offer to a brand, forcing the brands to come up with really awkward and meaningless campaigns.
Sometimes these advertisements become very intrusive also. Having said all that, I believe because of the 'social connect' and the 'serendipitous find' the potential is huge.
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Quizzing: A new mantra to create brand loyalty
We want to reach out to as many brands as possible in the shortest time and also would like to come up with innovative brand engagement products every quarter.
Apart from that we would like to explore the international market by end of this year. Once we receive our angel round of funding we are looking at expanding aggressively - both in terms of human resources and also geographic footprint.
What are your future plans?
We would like to provide various ways of providing engagement solutions to brands. We started with quizzing and brand conversation.
We are working on social quizzing, advergaming, Bollywood as an engagement platform and also would like to take this quizzing platform internationally.
We are also in talks with a Canadian ad network to expand globally and make Brandandme a global success.