Google India Marketing Campaign An Analysis

Even though you might have great products you still need to market them and when you are Google you can do a lot of cross platform marketing (using one of your products to promote others) but besides this you also need to do some sort of offline marketing to promote yourself. The latest Google India campaign does it both and is really ingenious

• Target Segment: Now all the major Internet companies have been eyeing the college segment in India since they know that most of Indians are first exposed to Internet only in campuses and then go on to become full time Internet users after leaving campus and usually stick with the sites they are introduced to first in campus.
• The Premise: Google India have been showing the above ad on Orkut to promote a Google app challenge wherein they want to takeover the Email and chat infrastructure of various education institutes in India. Google is asking the students or alumni of institutes to take the challenge of shifting their campuses to Google chat,docs,email etc and a successful implementation of this would lead to a prize from Google to that person thus targeting their hardcore users to implement this at their respective campus .
• Most of the major B schools and many technology institutes have build their campus network infrastructure offering email however maintaining them is a pain and so they usually offer a limited Email and chat facility thus restricting their students.
• Google's Aim: Google through this initiative of theirs hope to become the default client of major educational institutes in India and thus allow all the college students a sampling of Google apps with a hope that they will become addicted.
• Now if Google had tried to approach all the campuses themselves it would have been tough to convince authorities most of whom are government officials and notoriously tough to deal with but through this campaign they have tried to target the Google fanboys from campuses who throng Orkut and let them handle all the tough part.
• The prize for this event is a visit to Google India campus and a certificate of appreciation

I like three things about this campaign which makes it a memorable digital marketing casestudy.

1. Using your loyal user base to spread the word about your product
2. Targeting the removal of a major painpoint
3. and actually spending a very minuscule amount , and still reaching a large cross section of people

The only weakness in this campaign is that i am not sure how many people actually look at ads in Orkut and how many people will eventually be aware of about this campaign but i still think this is a master campaign.
Other Google Campaigns
Google India Local Marketing Campaign
Google Earth Matt Viral Video Campaign