E-commerce made a big splash this year for its festive season sales. Print and social media were the media of choice for advertising. Major players Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal pulled out the stops to get consumers buying.

Taranjeet Singh, Business Head, India, Twitter, observes that today brands are very good at using social media for their business. For instance, Myntra offered previews of its sale based on retweets and then built on it with discounts. Brands were smart at coming up with hashtags like #tryforgold (Amazon’s) that were more casual and did not necessarily incorporate the brand name into them. They used video well too. On Twitter, the native video advertising format achieved high engagement for brands because of the autoplay function, he says.

Initiatives such as Flipkart’s head honchos going out to deliver parcels personally, given the fiasco with its sale last year, grabbed attention and consumer trust and gave back to the brand in the form of tweets and retweets.

Twitter is important because it’s a live conversational medium that lets brands know what consumers are discussing and intend buying. According to Singh, deals and contests are key drivers in these conversations. Discounts, vouchers and free delivery are attractive incentives key to persuading festive shoppers.

Two studies, one by Team Pumpkin comparing the three portals’ marketing and communication online, and another by Mindshift Interactive, comparing Amazon and Flipkart, analysed the impact.

According to Team Pumpkin’s Swati Nathani, Flipkart more than made up for the damage done last year due to non-availability of products at its Big Billion Day Sale. Different categories of products were sold on different days. Snapdeal did its best to own the occasion with multiple strategies, whether it was capturing ad space, engaging social media audiences with witty replies or sponsoring the TV show Bigg Boss Season 9. Its efforts on Facebook could have been better, she says. Amazon, despite being a late entrant, made its mark in the Indian e-commerce space, giving sustained competition to the other two e-commerce giants.

Mindshift Interactive’s findings put Flipkart much ahead of Amazon in terms of brand image consolidation. The former did better on Facebook and Twitter though the percentage increase in Twitter followers was higher for Amazon. Brand elevation on Facebook was higher for Flipkart in absolute and in percentage.

Overall, when it came to the campaign hashtags, Flipkart was five times more effective than Amazon.

Campaign awareness for Flipkart was higher than Amazon, though app/website visits and the claim for purchases were similar. Social media awareness of Flipkart was higher as compared to Amazon. ‘Big Billion Day’ was more effective in terms of brand recall, but Amazon’s many contests offering gold, and its Dubsmash activity diluted the role of the brand, says Mindshift Interactive. “Amazon’s brand image of being credible rubbed off pretty well on the campaign. However, Flipkart’s consistent discounts and value proposition to customers made it more buzzing than the counterpart,” it added.

Input: Sravanthi Challapalli

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