Zoozoo – The new brand “endorser” for Vodafone

I was thinking of writing this blog from long time but somehow it was getting postponed. But this weekend, I went for dinner with my friends and as usual these days, IPL matches were telecast on Television. I was amazed to see that my friends were more interested in zoozoo Vodafone Ads than IPL matches. Nevertheless, we have all been privy to these white, scrawny creatures with giant heads as they invade our television screens during IPL matches. Let me first give you the background of zoozoo characters. On first look, these “zoozoos” in Vodafone TV may resemble animated cartoon characters with an alien look. But the interesting part is that zoozoos are not animated characters but are actually slim actors from local Mumbai theatres, dressed in white costumes that are stuffed with foam to portray the characters. These zoozoos characters in case you haven’t seen are created by O&M for Vodafone to convey different Value Added Services like Call Divert, Group SMS, and Cricket Alerts etc.

Prakash Varma, who directed the Vodafone zoozoo commercials told, that they only had women and occasionally children as their main cast to keep hands and legs thin of the zoozoo characters. And it was totally an India Idea, to lure the Indian audience’s

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Such is a furor with zoozoo that Vodafone ads are most watched ads on you tube and presently there are 168,848 fans on Facebook. To visit please check:

http://www.facebook.com/zoozoo

Vodafone has an IPL micro site for quizzes and contests, where one can view what kind of zoozoo he or she is as each zoozoo character has unique set of characteristics and traits allotted to it.

http://vodafone.in/ipl09/zoozoo.aspx

That’s about the zoozoo characters, now I want to put my “marketing thinking cap” to assay the marketing strategy behind these ads. In 2008, Vodafone had unveiled the “Happy to help” series during the first season of IPL. With the launch of second season, Vodafone gave birth to zoozoos. They have around 25 ads in their kitty and planned to release one ad a day to sustain the curiousness till the end of the tournament. In the past too, Orange and then Hutch had made use of characters - an animated boy-girl duo to whip up its VAS offerings before consumers. But these characters have been limited by their definition, but zoozoos can be mother, father, brother or sister. So it gives endless possibilities to creative minds. Through zoozoos Vodafone can endorse ‘n’ number of services like phone backup service which was introduced 2 years back but people were unaware of that due to improper or no publicity.

Satbir Singh, chief creative officer, shares his zoozoo experience: The other day, a waiter at a club mixed up my order as he was too busy watching the ad during the IPL. That’s what we say “Zooperb” effect.

But this zoozoo story has other side also, the older people is not that much into these ads as they were with earlier Vodafone ads. My personal experience says that these ads are perceived as just another cartoon strip ads and it take some time for old people to grasp it. Anyways the target audience for these ads are young generation since these are the person who generally uses the Value added services and if they are doing, Vodafone is not complaining.

But zoozoos comes with a warning message – one has to be careful about letting zoozoos become bigger than the brand. They suffered this to certain with the pug.

Recession: Blessing in Disguise

“Recession” – The word definitely arouses a very pessimistic sentiment in regard to starting a new venture.

But if we consider another side of the coin, recession is a right time to start new ventures. This may sound little optimistic, since during this time people become very cautious with their finance and fear about future. Many people around the world think this is not the ideal time to start any business endeavour. But that may be not necessarily true; there are many large companies that started the business during recession like:

IBM – International business machine - It came into existence at the time of long depression of 1873-1896.

GE – In the middle of the panic of 1873 a six year recession, Edison created one of the best know inventions of all time – the incandescent light bulb.

CNN – It might be news giant now, but in recession plagued 1980 it was little know station called The Cable Network News. It revolutionized how the information is received by starting a 24 hour news channel.

Wikipedia – Was born during the recent 9/11 recession.

The list goes on, there are many more companies like Disney,HP, FedEx, MTV Network, google, paypal etc.

So, this leaves us with many unanswered questions that why recession is the time to start a new venture as none of the factors are favouring for start-ups. I will try to give some of the many reasons to support my point, I may be little optimistic but that’s the way you should approach life.

1) Recession forces founders to be frugal – I think that’s the way a start-up should be; run it as cheaply as possible. The most common reason for death of start-up is running out of cash. So lesser the operation costs the harder to kill. And what better time could you think then recession to cut down the cost since everything gets cheaper. Moreover stringent flow of cash will lead to creative thinking and lessons learnt in frugality are invaluable.

2) Start-up success or failure depends upon merit of founders or idea rather than the state of economy. The economy has some effect but certainly, it cannot decide the fate of a start-up. Which means what matters is who you are rather then when you do it. So for any given idea the payoff will be fast in bad economy than for waiting. Microsoft first product was a basic interpreter for the Altair, that was exactly the time when world needed it. If Gates and Allen would have decided to wait it would have too late. Above mentioned companies where born at time of recession and they succeeded because world required them.

3) A common perception about recession is that people become very conservative about changing the job, no one wants to leave the comfort zone and put their job to jeopardy. On the flip side the people who are leaving their settled job and joining the start-up will be incredibly committed, believer in founder’s vision, ideas, ready to take risk and work in Spartan conditions.

4) Adversity brings out best of the qualities of the entrepreneur that needs to be successful like guts, leadership, team working. This will help the start-ups in long run.

So recession may be a good time to start a start-up. It’s hard to say that above mentioned advantages outweigh disadvantage like circumspect investors. But it doesn’t matter either way what matters is the people not the circumstances.