Ready for a new Avatar with Gojiyo

Go-Jiyo is the indian version of the popular Secondlife where the users can create their own avatars and interact with the other users, Gojiyo means go and live, started by the locks to home appliances conglomerate Godrej and boyce to market its products using this as a platform. The site allows users to create their avatars and interact with various products of godrej while they don this avatar.
Second life was successful as it allowed the users to have their own avatars, as well as brands to have their presence in the virtual world, like the real world this had counterfeits of luxury brands as well. in secondlife brands don't come for free they have an own currency which is exchanged by real currency. the game was highly successful as it allowed users to replicate all the things which they did in real world and also it allowed the users to control or do things which they cant do it in real world due to social norms.
Go-jiyo is a good effort by godrej as it has a host of products which can be placed in the virtual world and whether the indians would adopt this or not depends on the user interface and the excitement factor which would bring back the user regularly on the site. Social gaming site are quite famous as they allow users to share and compare their score with others. facebook has successfully tied up with app developers to develop applications for facebook, Zynga's farmville is an excellent example of social networking games. riding high on success of farmville zynga has launched many other games like fishville, mafia wars,yo ville etc. the success of social gaming sites depends on the following factors

1) Uniqueness of the concept : you should be the first one to launch, there is no room for the second player
2)Interactivity : it should allow users to interact with other players
3)Compete and share: This platform should rank the performance of the user and share it with their user.

Integrating Gojiyo with facebook is an excellent option as the user has all his friends on it and can invite and share his ranks with his friends, other advantage would be the user need not register again or log into some other site to play once he logs in through facebook he can play the game.

Website review

The site looks cool and has decent graphics the names are indianised. the major challenge would be to bring in traffic to the website and create awesomeness for the user, only then would he come back to the website. The only problem is the low bandwidth and lack of internet penetration in india would take time for people to don another new avatar.

check out the youtube videos of gojiyo here

Branding Commodity

Branding a commodity is the biggest challenge and also the principal aim of any brand. Its tough to differentiate as in a commodity the difference is minimal, hence the marketer’s task here is to find out the value add of the offering and try to bank on it. There have been many commodities in Indian context which have successfully branded like Cycle in Agarbathi, Tata salt, Dawaat basmati rice, Century plywood. These brands exist in a market where there are many organised and unorganised players yet they have a significant market and are able to a charge a premium due to a superior brand image.

So how do you brand a commodity?

Primary association: Hunt for the differentiating factor for your product from other brands and position with this attribute. For ex: Tata salt did it through Iodine content in its salt, this is the first step in branding there should be a difference which your firm is offering and this difference should be communicated clearly to the target group

Secondary associations: If there is no difference which you can create or your difference is copied by other players then try to add a superior image or create an emotive appeal with your brand this can be done by celebrity associations, humorous ads or emotional ads.

Step 3: Reinforce your primary and secondary associations to the consumer

ITC has been successfully branding all its business right from Cigarettes (Goldflake), Agarbathis(Mangaldeep), Matchsticks(Aim), Atta (aashirwad), Notebooks(classmate). Notebooks was a market which was dominated by the local unorganised sector and the differentiation was only based on the quality of the paper. ITC took a different approach and differentiated by introducing theme based note books for schools, colleges and professionals these note books were priced higher for the new look. Their new commercial has yuvraj and soha ali khan and the theme of the ad is based on the silence norm which is followed in most libraries. Hence the actors in the ad communicate through the book titles and a jingle is played in the back ground. Soha looks cool in the ad but I didn’t understand why they had to bring in yuvraj as the ad would have done well even with out him,I think IPL would be the reason for roping in yuvraj. The ad speaks about the brand extensions of the classmate brand into other stationaries and the tagline “For the big ideas in you” is nice and would work well with the brand. Overall a good ad and would be liked by the young.

Brand Story- Fastrack

Fastrack is one of the best Indian brand I adore, started in the year 1998 as a sub brand of TITAN went ahead to be as big as the parent brand TITAN. Thereafter it was launched as an independent brand removing the Titan tag from the brand name. The brand mantra of Fastrack is affordable fashion for the youth.

It tapped in a market that was fresh and relatively untapped by understanding the right need of providing the youth fashionable branded accessories which wouldn’t hurt their pockets. True to their promise, fastrack has consistently come up with new designs at an affordable price. The success in watches led to brand extension into other accessories market ranging form sunglasses, belts, bags, caps and wristbands and today it’s the largest selling sunglasses brand. Its promos were catchy, the campaigns 'how many you have men" and "move on" tapped the right emotions.

The brand has big plans as it has expanded its distribution network apart from selling through TITAN stores, It now retails through store-in-store models, watch retailers and other departmental stores. It has started their standalone retail shops of fastrack products at all the major cities and aim to reach 50 stores by this year end. This is one brand which has got its STP right. The TG is trendy, ambitious, thinks big and wants branded stuff which their friends recognize and fastrack priced it rightly with watches starting from 699/-

Whats Next ??

Fastrack has excellent brand recognition across all its products and is a cult among the youth, the brand should start a new campaign promoting their website and allow users to build their own communities across all its products. This would serve following purposes

1. Create loyalty for its products and Enable communication of proud Fastrack owners using similar products.

2. A platform to upload their pics on the site (sporting Fastrack products) and allow other users to rate & comment on how cool they are!

3. When the user logs in, the brand can promote its new collection, In this way it can cross sell to its existing base of loyal customers.