Overall Best Project: Godrej Industries' - GoJiyo

The Godrej group is one of India's leading business groups, having a legacy of 100+ years and a turnover of more than 2.6 billion USD. The group has a deep connect with the older age groups of India, with almost all of them having grown up with a Godrej product. With its target population gradually aging, the group felt a strong need to refurbish its brand image and identity to connect strongly with the Indian youth, which comprises 60% of Indian population. As most of the Indian youth today is online, the group decided to meet them on their own turf.

The implementation

The above need set the context for launching India's first online virtual world-www.gojiyo.com. Also known as GoJiyo, the virtual virtual world allows users to engage with each other in various activities, like playing online games, interact with like-minded strangers over chat, and social networking. The virtual arena currently has six immersive worlds where users interact with others via personalized avatars. During the course of this engagement, users also come across various offerings by Godrej, hence creating a brand affiliation.

The GoJiyo world was implemented over a short time span of just 4 months. The portal can run perfectly well over a 256 Kbps Internet connection from any web browser. The site prompts the user to download plug-ins that are required to run the 3D virtual world. Initially, it takes some time to load, because it's a 3D virtual world, which has a lot of images. But once loaded, the experience is very smooth.

The benefits

GoJiyo acts as an effective platform for Godrej to engage and understand user behavior and preferences through the analytics engine built in. This information is then used to execute various digital marketing schemes. Moreover, the company ensures that these schemes are not so in-your face kinds of activities, so that the users don't get turned off by it.

The success of GoJiyo can be understood from its user acceptance numbers. Already, there's a community of 5L+ registered members. With the platform, the percentage of target consumers intending to purchase Godrej products or pay premium went up from 70% to 80%. There has been a threefold increase in open rates, with 40% of users that opened emailers, actually clicking on content to perform an action in-world. More than 7.6 million page views, 5.6 million unique visitors, and 6 million+ total visits have been reported on the portal.

GoJiyo boasts of an average in-world brand interaction time of 23 minutes, with 37% of users, not just entering the world to �hang out� and chat, but going on to play games & activities. The repeat ratio of visitors is as high as 40% of the total base and average daily engagements with 17,000 + visitors. Promotion of a few prominent Bollywood movies has also happened on GoJiyo, which led to as high as 27,272 minutes of time spent per day and 7,50,000 visits in a single campaign.

Most successful campaigns

According to the project head, Ashutosh tiwari, 'Having a silo'ed marketing campaign wouldn't have worked. We consider a campaign as an activity, development, promotion graphification inside Gojiyo and even real world rewards. In that context, good clever tie-ups with younger gen movies, Indianised content, but not in a retro manner, but more in a grounded, Indian sheet manner are successful.� Here are some:

Enrique's Heartbeat Album: This was an international music tie up to promote the Heartbeat album by Enrique featuring Sunidhi chauhan. A user had to partner with another avatar and create their story of the most fabulous moments in Gojiyo.The best stories were put up on the newly launched Gojiyo blog. A story that got maximum positive comments was the winner. Both avatars were given a chance to go meet Enrique in person. The event was promoted for 28 days and received over 88000 registrations and over 1000 stories were submitted. Each user spent on an average 30 mins each time they logged on to Gojiyo. This event was a huge success as users made a lot more friends in world as they needed to partner with someone to submit entries. There was heavy online promotion through online banners. The company also made a co�branded TVC with the movie and promoted same on mass media.

Tees Maar Khan and Santa Claus : Another very successful campaign was a movie tie up to promote Tees Maar Khan. A game revolving around Tees Maar Khan and Santa Claus was set up wherein a user had to save Christmas by reliving Santa from Tees Maar Khan. Four avatars who saved Santa maximum times got a chance to meet Akshay and Katrina (stars of the movie). The activity lasted for a 17-day period wherein over 34000 registrations were made and the activity was played over 15000 times by 5000 avatars. This event was a huge success as users wanted to play more and more to win a chance to meet he stars. There was heavy online promotion through online banners. The Company also made a co�branded TVC with the movie and promoted the same on mass media.

Dussehra Dahan : Another famous campaign was the killing of Ravan during Dussehra period. A model of Ravan was created in Mauryavaas (one of the many virtual worlds on Gojiyo). The heads of the Ravan would move from one side to another. The user was given arrows and had to shoot down all 13 heads of Raavana in a maximum of 13 tries. The avatar who had the most successful attampts was given a prize.This activity lasted for a period of 10 days: Navratri and the day of Dussehra and it was played over 10000 times by 2000 avatars. The reason for its success was the experiential thrill that a user gets. There was heavy online promotion through online banners.

Q> How did you convince the management about going for such a solution?

Godrej was getting perceived by most young consumers as be 'my parent's brand'. It was only three and half years back when we gave it a new identity, positioning, etc. The most difficult task was to reach out to the new generation which was mostly present online. We studied the online environment and came to the conclusion that creating a branded virtual environment perfectly fit the bill. We wanted the brand to have a conversation with the youth-with the objective of first creating a relationship, and then getting into transactions later.

Q> How are you measuring the success of this platform? What's the RoI?

For onsite performance, we have had almost 5 million visitors & 5.5 lakh registered users in just an year. What's more, users inworld spend as much as 23 minutes per session inside interacting with the brand. In a similar vein, we're extremely active on Facebook with almost 2.5 lakh fans & a strong conversation volume. There is a significant uplift in perceptions about Godrej amongst people who are aware of Gojiyo & further, amongst people who have actually used Gojiyo. On ROI side, it's a more effective way of building a brand franchise: to most people, it comes as a shock that the cost of entire development of GoJiyo was lower than creating a conventional TV campaign.

Q> What's the way forward?

We're increasing Godrej's presence on GoJiyo. We shall create a Godrej land-a theme park. Providing e-commerce is also on our mind. Other companies wanting to tap the youth are approaching us, so we are looking at ways to tie up with them.