A quick look at BookMyShow's new ad campaign
What works and what doesn't
BookMyShow (BMS) is the leading ticket booking website in India for movies, plays, sports, etc. It’s only credible competitor in India is PayTM, the leading payments app in India, which is pushing ticket booking through its mobile app for movies and live events like noone’s business.
The pressure of PayTM’s market aggression seems to have prompted BookMyShow to come up with a fresh brand campaign with the hashtag #ItAllStartsHere. The ad spot is below, which offers a glimpse of all the non-movie experiences that one can book through BookMyShow, set to a rustic music score with the thread of Indian vowel sounds running through.
There is also another strong business reason for the campaign to focus on non-movie experiences, as typically BMS makes a higher margin on such ticket booking than on the movie ticket booking (given the significant consolidation of movie theaters in urban India under PVR and Inox, which limits BMS’s ability to ask for higher margins). Thus, non-movie ticket revenues, which is 35% of its topline, is also the more profitable revenue.
I really liked the creative thought and execution of the spot but I truly feel that it misses the mark in terms of taking the brand BookMyShow closer to the customer. This post explains why I think so but before that a quick branding refresher.
Why brands communicate?
Brands communicate with their customers primarily due to two reasons
Building Brand Salience: If it’s a brand in an existing category, build brand salience is the reason for communication. Brand salience means that your brand is in the consideration set of a buyer during any moment of purchase
Building new category: If the brand is trying to build a new category or a new use case, then get the users to start consuming the new category/use case and in turn drive brand’s adoption
All possible reasons for a brand’s communication can be encapsulated in these 2 reasons.
How brands communicate?
Building Brand Salience
For building brand salience, the communication needs to integrate two critical elements - Making it enjoyable/attention grabbing and strong brand visibility.
Enjoyable/attention grabbing: If you are an existing brand in an existing category, you are either already well known (thus a top brand) or not at all known (so a small/challenger brand). In either of these scenarios, the brand needs to make its communication that is enjoyable/attention grabbing to be able to get noticed by the customers
Strong brand visibility: It is important that the brand is strongly visible in such communication by leveraging its various associations - logo, colors, brand ambassador, music, situational context, etc.
Key point to note here is that for such communication to be effective, it needs to be based on deep insight about the customers and not the brand’s attributes. The deep insight could be that the TG behaves in a certain way (for instance 5 star ads in India) or how customers perceive people around them (the legendary Santoor soap ads) or how customers use the product in unpredictable ways (Spotify’s wrapped campaign). Brand attribute-based communication almost always never works here as the question of ‘what’s there for me’ doesn’t get answered, which is a cardinal sin in an existing category communication.
There are some obvious exceptions to this such as the Vicco Ayurvedic toothpaste based on natural ingredients where the communication focused on brand’s attributes and not on a deep customer insight. But the exceptions are few and far between and I will talk more about these in a subsequent post.
Building new category
In this scenario, building brand salience is not yet the most important task as the categroy does not exist/is under-penetrated so your brand is not fighting with other brands for mental space. Also, if you are able to build the category, as the category-builder, you automatically get brand salience. Here the only thing matter is if you are able to make a strong enough claim/promise to the cutomer based on a benefit that your brand offers.
The communication has to be centered on this promise and needs to persuade the customers to start using this category. The promise has to be convincing enough for the customers to start using this category.
Coming to the campaign
BMS is clearly an existing player in an existing category. Thus, the campaign needs to ensure that it is (a) enjoyable/attention grabbing (b) has strong brand visibility. To my mind, this campaign has both. The background score is great, creative thought is interesting, execution by rapid editing and montages holds attention, BMS logo is constantly there, etc.
However, the trick this campaign misses is that the communication is entirely based on brand’s attributes and has not considered the customer at all. The communication does not even push the envelope by moving from attributes to benefits of BMS and it certainly does not answer the question ‘what’s there for me’
One should also carefully consider the TG to which BMS wants to reach. As a rule, brand’s communication should be targeted to the light/infrequent users as heavy users of a brand tend to notice the brand’s communication more in any case
It is also important to look at how do people reach an ecommerce website (BMS being one):
Organic/Discovery: User searches for a movie/event on a search engine and the top result shows BMS’s booking page. These are typically the infrequent/light users of the brand. There are also another type of users who will go to the website/app of BMS and PayTM, compare prices/offers and then book the one which gives them maximum benefit. These are the ones who should be targeted by the brand communication
Habit: User goes directly to the website or app of BMS or PayTM and searches for the movie/event. These are already heavy users of the brand BMS (or at least those users among whom the brand has strong salience) for some reason - user experience, some sort of lock-in, habit, etc. Also, directly targeting another brand’s loyal customers doesn’t work in most cases. Thus, this set of users are not the key TG for this communication
Ads: Here the brand communication does not matter. What matter is (a) exclusivity of movies/events (b) which company hits the customer first with their ad offering (usually with some discount)
I do not know what percentage of users of BMS fall in the #1 category above but that seems to be the TG, which this communication should target. I am sure BMS has sufficient data to know that the size of this opportunity is large enough to merit a large and expensive campaign.
However, the campaign would have been better if the creative was focused on taking the brand closer to the customer and based on a deep customer insight.