Goibibo gears up for the high travel season with Deepika Padukone

Goibibo has announced the launch of its summer campaign and introduced its first ever celebrity brand ambassador, Bollywood star, Deepika Padukone. The campaign highlights Goibibo’s travel social network- ‘GoContacts’. The new campaign uses the element of subtle humour to highlight the benefits of the unique ‘GoContacts’ feature on the Goibibo’s platform. Through the new campaign, Goibibo aims to increase new user acquisition and augment hotel market share growth. This is in line with company’s endeavor to catalyze the shift from offline to online in the hotel booking segment. The hotel market in India is highly fragmented with low online penetration (16% in 2016, source: Milward Brown & Internal Estimates), presenting a tremendous opportunity for players like Goibibo. Launched in mid-2016, the feature – GoContacts leverages the power of technology to create network effects in the customers’ socio-sphere and is on its way to become India’s largest travellers’ community. 

Social media usage and adoption in India is at an all-time high. Availability of affordable smartphones resulting increased mobile internet penetration and adoption is a key factor driving this trend. Indian travellers are becoming younger and this generation relies heavily on its social network for all kinds of research, planning and consumption. The GoContacts feature is set on this premise. It urges its users to engage with their respective social circles and leverage the power of networking to not only bring value for themselves but also for the members of their social circle(s). 

Commenting on this, Rajesh Magow, Co-Founder & CEO-India, Merged Entity said, “GoIbibo has been at the forefront of product innovations in the online travel aggregation space and GoContacts is a great value proposition to increase engagement and reliability amongst existing and potential customers. In a category that still has only 16% online penetration, we have already managed to sync millions of users through this feature. Collaborative consumption has emerged as a concept and is fast gaining speed in the Indian e-commerce segment as well. GoContacts has been built on this concept. This feature, combined with Deepika’s charming and affable presence as the brand ambassador of Goibibo, will further help us build a huge amount of trust and reliability amongst customers with regards to hotel research and planning on our platform and thereby, further our larger business objective of expanding the category and increasing our market share in the online hotel booking segment.” 

The GoContacts feature allows customers to use something as convenient as their phone contacts, sync it with the Goibibo app and every time anyone from the contact list books a flight, hotel or bus on Goibibo, the user will get Rs 50 gocash+ and this cash can be redeemed against future travel bookings by the user, without any usage limit. 

Commenting on the new marketing campaign, Saujanya Srivastava, Group Chief Marketing Officer said, “The campaign is in line with the company’s business strategy of focusing on hyper aggressive growth and new user acquisition in the hotels segment; thus driving growth for the travel industry at large. Goibibo’s natural appeal is with a younger, tech savvy, transaction focused customer. Travelling is more spontaneous and is always on their minds. Therefore they are always planning and always saving for the trips. So the smarter they travel, the more they travel. Every rupee saved means more miles traveled. Leaning in on this insight, through this campaign our aim is to connect with our audience via a quirky, fun story encouraging them to leverage their socio-sphere to land not just great savings for themselves but also for their family and friends.” 

The company has launched a 360° marketing campaign including multi TVCs activating every possible touch point with the consumer. The characters in the TVC has been brought to life by Publicis Capital. Talking about the creative concept, Nitin Pradhan, Head – Creative, Publicis Capital, said, “We wanted to communicate how the current generation thinks and acts when it comes to online behaviour, especially in the context of travel and bookings. However, trying to act and look cool to make the point would have been counterproductive and laborious, so we thought of bringing that out in a sweet slice-of-life manner by contrasting the conventional ideologies. Situationally, we thought, it was a space that could highlight new-age thinking effortlessly and make for some engaging, light-hearted moments of banter. Also, it allowed us to portray Deepika a bit differently, as a relatable, young person, instead of the superstar.”

The TVC will be on air for a period of 06 weeks on GECs, news, cricket and movie channels and IPL.