And so car rallies, which were just an obscure sporting event in this part of the world are now becoming the ‘in’ thing to do.

Bird's eye-view- Car Rally

Car rally events have been taking place in Pakistan for ages, but they were mostly held outside the cities and only the die-hard fans participated in them with spectators only a pipedream. Then came Fast & the Furious at the start of the millennium and 10-second races gained popularity in the cities with people tweaking their cars and stuff. The fan following grew as well but even then it was a low-key event shunned by the mainstream media.

But now with all these channels struggling to come up with original content, these car related events have become a lucrative possibility. Their popularity has been further spurred by the sponsoring of major brands that are ever so eager to participate in a BTL activity. The result – while in the past hardly a single car related event occurred in a year, 3-4 events are now held every year.

Dreamworld Car Rally is one of those rare events that are being held every year for the last ten years. Although geared primarily towards the members of the Dreamworld Resort, the event is open to non-members as well albeit at a higher cost. In the last couple of years, the marketing department of Dreamworld is increasingly making efforts to make the event a prominent feature of the city, by not only purchasing air time on TV channels, but also approaching companies for a sponsorship opportunity.

Although the event hasn’t attained the pinnacle of success in terms of fame and popularity, it is an ideal branding opportunity. How?

If you go by the acceptable local standards of what makes a branded event successful, then Dreamworld Car Rally can be deemed a partial failure. The local standard entails that the event ought to be covered by one of the giants of the electronic medium, GEO, Dawn News etc. Then it needs to have a prominent personality as host, and then it ought to be sponsored by a plethora of giant brands like Unilever, P&G and Reckitt Benckiser. Anything short of this and the event is rated below par. And now, you need to invite bloggers as well to adjudge the event and buzz about it in the social media.

So what makes an event ideal for branding endeavor? First and foremost, the event should be a memorably pleasant experience for all the participants. This is the single most important factor for any branded event. You take this out of the picture, and nothing, no matter how big, could make either the event or the brands associated with it favorably placed in the consumer’s mind.

Secondly, it ought to be sponsored by major brands, but not so many as to induce brand clutter, something which is witnessed with regularity at Dawn’s Lifestyle Exhibition. Dawn’s Lifestyle Exhibition is a classic example of frills without the thrills. There are so many brands participating in the event that unless you have the capacity to dish out a couple of million rupees to highlight your brand at the event, it’s better to stay away from it. So many brands make the mistake of jumping on the Lifestyle bandwagon as if there’s a gold rush, and end up just throwing their money away with negligible enhancement to their brand equity.

They do have a plausible reason for participation. There’s this principle of consumer behavior that if you place your brand in the presence of popular brands, some of their popularity will rub off on your brand. And it does work. But not when you have a gazillion brands good and bad vying for the same thing.

The second major reason the Dawn Lifestyle exhibition has ceased to be a great branding opportunity is the sheer size of the traffic it generates.  With such a huge crowd cramming the once spacious halls, it becomes a struggle even to breathe properly let alone walk or shop around. Most of the time you spend getting nudged from all directions which may be a memorable experience alright, but for all the wrong reasons, especially the female visitors. In fact this time around the rush spilled onto the main road as well just outside the entrance to the site. The entire flyover over Hasan Square got choked because of the cars trying to enter or leave the premises, so much so that there was an accident as well between a car exiting and one going straight on the main road. What can be more unpleasant than that?

Coming back to the Dreamworld Car Rally, it is as near to a perfect branding opportunity as you can get in this part of the world. The biggest reason for that is the format of the event. It is designed in such a way that every member of the family participating has a rollicking time throughout the day filled with adventure, excitement and of course food and drinks for a very reasonable amount.

The format is that each participating family is given an initial set of clues at the starting point which they have to make sense of to discover the next check point where they receive the next set of clues and so on until the end. While the head of the family drives, the rest of the family solves the clues so that everyone stays riveted to the game. The checkpoints are distributed throughout the city while the finishing line is at Dreamworld Resort.

In that sense it is not a car rally per se since the emphasis is not on speed but brainpower.

This alone is reason enough for any brand to sponsor this event. But it is not the only reason. PSO, Pepsi, Dominos, Nelson, AGS, Red Bull, TV One, City FM89 and Shezan. Sound like big brands? Sure does.

Therefore it has got the big brand factor covered perfectly to the hilt because although big brands are sponsoring, but there aren’t that many as to cause brand clutter.

PSO, it has to be mentioned, has been the main sponsor of this event for the last seven or eight years. They must be attaining some substantial ROBI (Return on Brand Investment) so as to be sponsoring this event every year.

All this raving review of Dreamworld’s Car Rally doesn’t mean it was a picture perfect event. It had its share of follies, but these were more to do with the coverage of the event rather than the event itself. For instance, the event was to receive substantial coverage in the social media via Facebook as well as traditional media via billboards and mobile vans. In fact these tactics were to be applied prior to the event to create some hype. Dreamworld didn’t implement this strategy properly. Secondly, although the coverage of the event was comprehensive enough, something went terribly wrong in the editing room so that the final production was below par. For starters, the entire two episodes aired on the tv channels had majority of the focus on just three families selected before the event on God knows what criteria. 90% of the air time was allotted to the treasure hunt foibles and antics of these three families, 8% of the time was given to the starting point activities and a measly 2% was given to the closing and prize distribution ceremony.

What should have been done was to allocate at least 40% of the time to the starting and ending activities, 20% of time on other contestants and then 40% of the time could have been given to those three families. 

Even if  Dreamworld wanted to give as much coverage to these families as it did, it should have at least ensured that they had some on-screen presence. The families were not comfortable before the camera, having no idea how to behave, whether to act naturally or dramatically. If Dreamworld had planned to bank so much on these families for the success of the program, they should at least have picked those who could carry themselves gracefully in front of the camera.

The bottom-line is that the brands that not only spent big money on the sponsorship but invested considerably in the activities on ground as well (like Shezan and Red Bull provided the participants with Red Bull, Atlas Battery’s AGS conducted free battery check-up) should have been given sufficient time on air as opposed to less than 30 seconds they received. Was giving a minute or two to these brands such a hard task? And the incredible thing was, the main sponsor PSO didn’t even get a single second!

If Dreamworld is to popularize this concept with the brands so that they invest more for it, they need to provide better coverage for them. No doubt Dreamworld has come up with a unique event unparalleled in this part of the world, and if they can just rectify the fallacies of this year’s event, it has the potential to become a mega event of the country.

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First, a little about the ‘The Second Floor’. The Second Floor now rechristened as the T2F 2.0 is the brainchild of Sabeen Mahmud, a sort of a social entrepreneur. The brand is positioned to be a haven for intellectual pursuits, from book-reading to Singing workshops to Entrepreneurial seminars, it aims to be in the thick of creative endeavors of the city.

This session was coordinated by Jehan Ara, the president of PASHA in the absence of Sabeen Mahmood.

Here are the highlights of what transpired at the event:

(Shahjehan kicked off his presentation with the famous social media video that has become the norm at all such events:

• How many users are there on Facebook in Pakistan?
• About 1 million and the numbers are increasing exponentially.

• That’s the paradigm shift in cyberspace. With the proliferation of social media platforms, news spread instantly, virally and exponentially.
• I can try any brand and then blog about it and hundreds of people would know about it right away.

• A product can make or break by a single post from the user because everyone is connected to everyone else.

• Social media has stirred changes in publication in the following way:
  • Publish:  Infinite as opposed to few
  • Comment: Feedback as opposed to Monologue
  • Share: Viral as opposed to limited distribution

• If HBL for instance provides unpleasant customer service to just one person like me, I can spread negative word of mouth in the online arena and within no time HBL will have a serious problem just because of one disgruntled customer.

• However, you just cannot write something about a brand or a person and get away with it. When you are writing for a publication in the real world, credibility is neither established nor wiped away instantly, but online the entire world can comment on your article and everyone else can see what the others have said about it. So credibility is quickly built up or destroyed virally solely by the commentators of the article who themselves may not be the experts.

• As an entrepreneur if you are thinking what am I going to say to my customers online, then you are asking the wrong question. What the customers are saying about you is a more pertinent question.
• How to create enormous value for your business at virtually zero cost is a real possibility and ought to be the ultimate aim of any business aiming to use social media.

• T-Shirt Wars (Showed the video on Youtube) is a video made by a couple of budding entrepreneurs on a shoe-string budget and yet it has been able to generate enormous interest, having 4 million views to date.

• In contrast brands like Mobilink and Telenor spend crores to generate the same level of interest.

• The new mantra is to create an experience around your brand to engage the consumer instead of just communicating the message which is a fundamental flaw of marketing of today’s era that communication wins customers.

• The fundamental mistake of advertising is that repetition works. Of media is that content is king.

• Offering a platform to the consumer to interact and engage in the brand, generating his own content along the way is the new age strategy.

• Facebook is most effective in spreading information because of the news feed feature. Anything one person updates or writes about gets permeated to all the connected people. But the new itself ought to be enticing enough so that people pass that down to their connections.
• Coke Studio was a culturally relevant product which appealed to this connected world, becoming a mega-hit in the social media sphere and not because it was produced by Coke.

• In networked markets where there are hundreds of thousands of blogs, e-zines and what not on every topic under the sun, the commodity which will be the most scarce is Attention. You get the attention of the consumer and you’ve made it in the new world. Hence this is the age of Attention Economy.

• The best way to get the attention of your target market is to engage them in something that excites them. Threadless, a small start-up was able to do just that by offering customers the opportunity to design their own shirts which threadless would then manufacture.

• Daily Fashionist is doing well on Facebook having made 70,861 fans.

• However, as a small start-up don’t expect to reach this number anytime soon and that also without spending money. If you want to be popular on Facebook having a large number of fans, you need to advertise on facebook.

• And without a huge number of fans, you cannot expect to create a viral campaign. Just don’t expect to create a facebook page, put all your friends on it as fans and expect to go viral any news you put in your network no matter how good it is.

• Until and unless you have at least thousands of fans for your brand, you cannot create a viral campaign on Facebook.

• The good news is that advertising on Facebook in Pakistan is extremely cheap. For just a $100 or so, you can generate a lot of fans provided you advertise the right way. Instead of directing your target market to your website, you should direct them to your facebook profile and urge them to become a fan. That way you can stay connected to them and entice them with good offers as opposed to making them visit your website where they’ll just visit once and forget about it.

• Also while creating the ad campaign on facebook, choose the CPC (Cost per click) instead of CPM (Cost per impressions) because by choosing the former you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. In the latter option you would have to pay for every impression generated which is a waste of money because if you bid too low, facebook won’t show the stats of the impressions that your ad got.

• Also while choosing the target audience, don’t choose the sex. For instance if you choose female, chances are you’ll end up with a very low turnout. It’s best to choose all options under Pakistan. That way you’ll have the maximum possible reach.

• On an average expect to pay Rs. 3 to 10 per fan. But that can wary enormously depending upon a number of variable. For instance a brand about fashion and style is going to generate a lot of fan following because these are the topics dear to the Pakistani heart especially women.

• Facebook advertising in Europe and USA is very expensive, and if the same rates are applied here as well, then you would be better off using the traditional modes of marketing.

• Remember that fans on facebook do not necessarily translate into sales. You have to engage the fans in a meaningful way for you to cajole the fans into buying your brand.

• Twitter although an effective viral tool in the world is not so in Pakistan because not many people here use it. You need to have a critical mass on a particular platform for it to be effective. Until more Pakistanis embrace, it won’t.

• The same goes for Youtube. Do a search for Pakistani videos on Youtube and you would be hard pressed to find a single meaningful one. That’s because Pakistanis are not that active on Youtube and most of the videos they themselves refer are foreign videos.

This was just a brief account of what Shahjahan presented at that talk.

Now, the brand valuation of the brand that is Shahjahan Chaudhary. Shahjahan is one of those budding entrepreneurs that are specialist in a field that didn’t even exist a few years ago. But he’s sensible enough to know that promoting yourself the traditional way in the real world is still the best possible strategy. Giving presentations and interacting with people face to face still reigns supreme, and he’s capitalizing on that to build his personal brand.

However, he does need to spruce up his presentation style. Nothing wrong with his delivery or confidence, it’s just that his presentation sounded more like a lecture in the university rather than an allusive speech on social media. Captivating the audience for two hours straight is no child’s play, and to capture their attention even for brief moments of time within that time frame is no mean task. He was able to do it for small bouts interspersed in dull passages of time, which was evident from the audience’s body language.

To be fair he did manage to engage the audience in the dying moments of the workshop and ended on a high note. Plus he was candid enough to state the ground reality about facebook instead of raising it to the altar of invincible success. He was forthright about the pitfalls and limitations of facebook and other social media tools which most other ‘social mediapreneurs’ won’t tell you about. He even explained about how to advertise on facebook on your own instead of seeking his help.

What he needs to do is instead of just explaining things like ‘being honest is going to be effective in the social media sphere’ or giving hypothetical examples, give concrete examples. The shirt wars and threadless were good examples. He needs to inundate his presentation with such examples, giving an example for each point he’s making, preferably even giving examples from his own experience. People warm up to you when they hear about your own success or failure story.

Shahjahan got off to a good start showing the famous social media video, but then he launched in a sort of monotonous lecture devoid of real-world cases. Even the slides were bland at most.  The slideshow is available on slideshare. Judge it yourself.

The thing is, if you lose your audience in the first five minutes, you’ve lost them forever.

To Shahjahan’s credit he managed to recapture his audience to an extent. And every time he piqued the interest of his audience, it was either due to a real example or a pragmatic way to boost up their business, and that’s exactly what he should be doing for majority of his presentation.

The most mindboggling thing about this whole event is its lack of coverage, let alone mainstream media, even online. The most amazing thing is that there’s no post-event review even on the organizers’ websites, t2f 2.0, PASHA or on Jehan Ara’s blog even though she seemed to be filming the whole event. There’s no video on Youtube.  Then there were quite a few people from the media side including Dawn and Synergizer yet no one bothered to cover the event online.Maybe there is some sort of mention of it in the dark recesses of the net, which is as good as non-existent.

Then Shahjehan has a blog of his own by the name of Billion Dollar Workshop which he seems to have abandoned after just a single post more than two years ago. If he’s not going to be using it anymore, he ought to completely delete it instead of letting it stay in a state of limbo because it’s showing in the search results. You don’t want any material floating around that doesn’t augment the brand image that you are trying to project, not if you can help it.

Bottom-line: You need to capitalize on every available opportunity to promote your brand even if it’s just a presentation in the real world or a blog in the virtual world.

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1. Tipping Point Conference- The Social Media Event It was supposed to be graced by Chief Minister of...

To become a great brand, it will have to do a whole lot more than what it is doing right now. Let’s first see what it has been up to. If you want to get a feel of what sort of goodies they are offering, head over to Restaurants Uncut analysis.

There’s no doubt that Studio Café is far ahead of any café or restaurant in Pakistan in terms of its marketing endeavors. Except maybe OPTP (One Potato Two Potato) which has actually come up with an app for Facebook which enables it to conduct contests and offer prizes in terms of OPTP goodies.

Studio Café has a presence on Facebook, and a favorable one but it hasn’t gone to the extent that OPTP has done. But it sure is able to generate quite a following there with a whopping 1,227 fans and counting. And the reason it has been able to do that is because it keeps itself relevant and updated to the latest happening. Come Valentine’s Day, it tailored itself to that. Then when the U-19 Pakistan cricket team got to the finals of the World Cup, it offered a cup of free coffee per table if Pakistan won the Finals, and it communicated this with the help of a poster on Facebook. Someone asked whether it’s one cup per table or per person. So it would have been better had they offered one cup per person. That would have provided more motivation than just one cup. I mean it’s only coffee and not one of their main entrees. And anyway, Pakistan didn’t win and so the offer didn’t materialize.

By and large people on Facebook seems to be quite happy with what they are offering, so Studio Café has a real time feedback system and should be able to tell them if they do something horribly wrong. That does not mean they shouldn’t have a feedback card in place at the café which they don’t. People will usually not remember any small foibles by the management enough to comment on it later on facebook but they may well remember it in their subconscious, enough not to come back. That’s one area where they need improving.

Then although they have created a Twitter account and they have not written a single Tweet since the place opened shop on 6^th December. Can you believe that? Twitter has become one of the most effective viral tools on the net and Studio Café is just keeping it dormant. They need to focus on it more. But what can they do with it? Same thing they are doing with Facebook. If they have a special offering, they should tweet it. Although they seem to be having seven followers on Twitter, on closer inspection you will notice that at least five of them are just spam accounts. So it needs to ensure that it has proper followers on Twitter.

The wisest thing Studio Café has done is promote the brand on karachisnob.com. Karachi Snob is fast becoming the online hub of eating houses both for the restaurateurs and the consumers. Not only that but if you Google any restaurant, chances are its going to be mentioned on the top 10 results courtesy Karachi snob. And Karachisnob does do a great job of promoting a food joint, taking brilliant snapshots of that place to create a virtual tour which it showcases along with the general description as well as the menu of the restaurant.

They even have a presence on Youtube, but a five second clip containing a solitary image does not make for a good Youtube video by any stretch of the imagination. And this was uploaded by them as part of the publicity hype before the opening. They need to add more material there. But what?

It could make a video clip showcasing the portraits that they have taken, taking permission from the people whose snapshot is taken of course. Nine times out of ten people will be eager to be shown on Youtube looking their best. So that shouldn’t post much of a problem.

Studio Cafe

The biggest shortcoming of Studio Café to date is the absence of a website of their own. Sure they have a tremendous presence on karachisnob but karachisnob only offers this focus for a limited time and it costs money each time you want to be highlighted. Once that period expires, you are left with nothing, like it happened with The Original Crepe Factory. Sure there is facebook but facebook cannot compete with a proper website in terms of reach. Studio Café needs that badly before the arrangement expires on karachisnob.

Then if they can manage it, a blog to go with the website providing the details of the latest happenings as well as any new product they are introducing, what were the challenges they faced in coming up with that product and how great they think it’s going to turn out. They can even propose a free sampling of the new product, say between 7 to 8 pm only on a specific Monday. That will not only catch the fancy of the target market but ensure it doesn’t cost a fortune by severely limiting the free period range.

Which brings us to their menu. They have a pretty limited menu compared to the competitors, but it’s a good thing. Branding laws state that you can never be everything to everyone so why waste the energy? Instead of trying to offer everything under the sun, offer just a few items but focus on making them the best stuff the customer is going to taste that part of the town.

But this does not mean they should keep the menu static. Far from it. They need to keep coming with new and innovative dishes which they can promote on their blog, website, facebook and most importantly, within their café.. They could either put it on a blackboard or make a small plaque advertising the new hot stuff. It’s nothing new, most of the big brands like Copper Kettle and Arizona Grill indulge in it, and it’s worth emulating. You need to make the customer coming back for more by tempting him with new exciting recipes.

Studio Café is taking maximum advantage of the promotion on karachisnob by including the product of their studio section as well along with the food snaps. But the snaps are almost all wedding portraits, which gives the impression that they only offer wedding portraits. What they need to do is show off a couple of casual photographs as well to show that you don’t need to snap a photo only on a wedding occasion, but you can make every occasion a memorable one and savor it by getting your group photographed.

And they would do well to showcase their studio packages as well on karachinob just like what they have done with the menu. In fact they need to showcase these to the diners as well who come to the place, especially the first-timers. The management is assuming that whoever walks into the café is already aware of the three different offerings of the place. Never assume, especially in this business.

What they can do is create a master menu which offers the three services: dinner, sheesha and photograph, and then have individual menus for them. In fact, give all the three menus to the customers so that while they’re indulging in one service, they can be tempted to try the other two services as well.

We for instance didn’t know about the different offerings of the place and just stayed at the diner lounge because that was where we were seated by the waiter in the first place. During the course of our stay, no one from the management approached us whether we would like to get our group photographed. And that is a serious blunder. Don’t pester the customer but at least let him know what other things you’re offering and what are the price points, then leave him to decide on his own.

All in all, Studio Café has done a good job of promoting the place especially online. Just Google it and you would find the top 10 results not only mentioning the place but highly in favor of it. But, and there’s always a but, it needs to further jazz up its marketing especially in the first two years of its life. Remember the happening café Caffeine near MacDonald Sea View which used to offer pretty much the same things as Studio Café minus the photography part. Well, it’s no more.

Another rumor doing the rounds is that the whole Khayaban-e-Shahbaz strip on which Studio Café is situated is jinxed. Grapevine has it that quite a few restaurants opened on this strip, did roaring business for the first three months, and then all of a sudden ceased to exist. Studio Café will have to guard against this trend, even talk to the previous entrepreneurs who opened shop here to find out what precisely what went wrong with their business.

Getting off to a rollicking start is a good measure of whether the place will survive for long. But it’s not an absolute measure as Caffeine cafe found out the hard way.

If you want to get a feel of their sumptuous factor, head over to Restaurants Uncut.

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But it’s not a new trend by any stretch of the imagination. Pakistanis have always been into eating big time since God knows when. Whether it’s the lack of entertainment options or something else hasn’t been unearthed as ye,t but one thing is crystal clear, this industry is going to be the biggest earner and possibly a big contributor to the GDP in the days to come. And yet, it has not attracted the attention of MNCs, TV/radio channels or big shot marketers. Nor is the industry marketing-savvy. Yes, there are notable exceptions, like Dawn News is providing some ‘food for thought’ with the program ‘For the Love of Food’ which aims exclusively on this industry.

You would have thought by now one of the giant MNCs – Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser or P&G – would have launched a restaurant or a café based on its brands, similar to what Igloo has done with the Dip Shop concept.

But by and large, the industry hasn’t been put in the limelight by the electronic media. Brandasy.com has tried to cover it to some extent, only to realize that an industry of this size requires an entire site dedicated to it and not just one category on a branding website.

restaurants uncut

Hence the birth of Restaurants Uncut, a website which is a comprehensive review guide of the restaurants, cafes, ice cream parlors, ‘dhabas’, ‘thelas’, anything that sells an edible item. All reviews are categorized according to the cuisine (French, Italian, Pakistani, fast food, BBQ), price range (Rs.100 to over Rs.1000), area (from Clifton to Buffer Zone) and special offers. Initially, only the eateries of Karachi are going to be covered, hence the categorization according to area and not city. But later on, other cities’ specialties are going to be put to the sword as well.

That’s the consumer’s part.

It doesn’t stop there. It then goes on to provide an in-depth analysis of the food joint from a marketer’s point of view, what it is doing right or wrong, what more it could do and whether it should just close shop or continue to press on. No subtleties here.

There’s going to be a ‘Consumerater’ at the end of each review, which would tell the prospective customer at a glance whether to indulge in a particular joint or not. Plus the map of each restaurant is shown courtesy Google Maps and Paktive.

The site would develop with time and consumer feedback of whether a particular review correctly guided the person or not, and what more information can be divulged to aid the visitor in making a better eating-out decision.

Finally, Restaurants Uncut provides links to all websites that offer advice on the eating-out scene.

In-short restaurants uncut is a one-stop solution for all the restaurateurs and their consumers.

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Why would you expect this viral campaign to go big?

There are a number of reasons for that. One, it is being conducted by Nestle, the largest MNC (Revenue-wise, surpassing even Unilever) operating in Pakistan. Secondly it is being simultaneously conducted on the viral networks of today, viz. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, augmented by a dedicated website 7days1night. Thirdly, and more importantly, there are an estimated 2 million online users in Pakistan, more than 500,000 of which are on Facebook. Nestle’s campaign falls way short of  this number. How do we know that? The evidence is right there in the number of comments the website has received (about 6,200) as well as the number of Facebook members which stands at a mere 5,438 members.

nestle fruita vitals-facebook

nestle fruita vitals-twitter

nestle fruita vitals-youtube

nestle fruita vitals-website

But even if you ignore these figures, how many people do you know who spend a majority of their time online knew about this event? Many of my net-savvy friends didn’t know about it. I deliberately search for such online events and even I almost missed it.

The premise is simple enough. You need to state why you should be the one to be adjudged the winner. The interesting thing is you can give as many reasons as you want, but no two reasons should be posted within five minutes of each other. The even was divided into two parts, the winner of the first stage got an Ipod Touch and the second stage winner got to have an HP Notebook in addition to a limo ride and dinner with six friends.

This pretty much ensures that each and every visitor spends a lot of time on the site and brand profile pages on facebook and twitter. Simple but cunning nonetheless.

The other thing surprising about this event is that it hasn’t caused any major ripples in the blogosphere. Apart from Teeth Maestro and ProPakistani, no one has really bothered about it. Even both these bloggers have just posted the most basic of information.

If you google the phrase nestle fruita vitals, most of the results reflect material posted on the net by Nestle itself. Not many independent reviews, unfortunately for Nestle. In fact, even most of the independent reviews are just reverberations of Teeth Maestro’s post.

So, is it a failure? Not really. It all depends upon the goals set by the brand manager Beenish Pervaiz. If her goal was to target a particular niche of young people, and the interaction was more important than the penetration, then it may be construed as a success. It all depends upon the perception and objectives of the people running the show.

It won’t figure prominently in the list of top viral campaigns, that’s for sure. The Lays Chips Haram controversy was more viral than this even though it was merely spread through email which then got picked up by the bloggers. But then it had more time to ‘germinate’ than this one. After all, a couple of weeks is too short a time to spread the word, even if it is online.

To Nestle’s credit, all the communication material online is immaculately thought out and designed including the Facebook profile. The one thing missing is the lack of Facebook applications.

Remember Burger King and their double whopper application on facebook where you could get a free whopper for sacrificing your facebook contacts? This innocuous tactic spread like wildfire in the online community so much so that Facebook had to step in and shut it down.  This was an ideal opportunity for Nestle to do something along those lines.

And these viral events really get you thinking what are the essential ingredients of a successful viral campaign? Here is Nestle, a giant of an MNC which has come up with a pretty safe campaign strategy which encompasses all the electronic media, and yet it doesn’t achieve the magnitude of an epidemic outbreak which, let alone organizations, mere individuals have been able to attain.  

Remember the ‘Numa Numa’ video (fat kid dancing) on Youtube? That video has been viewed over 900 million times all over the world and has made a star out of that guy. His investment was a  computer, internet connection and a webcam. He comes nowhere even close to the effort and time and money put in by Nestle. So what gives?

If Nestle’s aim was to nurture brand evangelists, then this campaign which concluded two days ago was right on target. The winner along with his six friends is definitely going to have a stupendous experience which he’ll associate with the brand, and hopefully stay loyal and vocal about the brand for life, unless of course, things don’t go wrong terribly.

Pakistani marketers have had some good success with their online campaigns like the Samsung Treasure Hunt, but none so far have matched the viral speed of the controversial emails that spring up in the Pakistanis’ inboxes from time to time.

It’s high time that some brand came along that swept the whole nation off its cyber feet. And it better be something positive.

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