Shopping made easy

HomeShop18 went digital to refresh its offering on a limited budget

E-commerce is best described as a warzone currently. With competition mounting HomeShop18 wanted to refresh itself to stay relevant. It came up with an interesting new proposition-'Shopping Makes Me Happy'- but the problem was it had a small budget. The jingle had to be popularised with a digital-first strategy that encouraged interactivity. The only other support vehicle would be radio - so that the jingle can be popularised quickly.

The main online vehicle it zeroed in was Twitter. The danger was that the social networking site was fraught with contests, with something new being launched every other week. In short, HomeShop18's strategy had to be clutter breaking.

For HomeShop 18, the target group was 22-40 year-old audiences that express themselves openly via social media and go for e-commerce portals as their primary route of shopping. MindShift Interactive was hired as the agency to create the digital innovation.

HomeShop18 had to bear in mind the insight that with decreasing attention spans and with the ever-increasing number of campaigns, consumers were becoming selective about the brands they wanted to interact with.

Given that, the social media campaign was driven on emotion -people were asked what made them happy. The campaign was built in five phases with Twitter conversations revolving around happiness and excitement among key opinion leaders and digital enthusiasts. The campaign garnered an overall outreach of 23 million users across social media, trending for over a day in India.

Name of the brand: HomeShop18
Agency: MindShift Interactive
Digital case: Shopping Makes Me Happy

With conversations at a peak among influencers and followers alike, HomeShop18 announced the 'Shopping Makes Me Happy' jingle video and encouraged followers to share happy moments using the hashtag #MakesMeHappy. The biggest innovation in the campaign was the creation of personalised caricatures that brought alive the tweets and were gifted to people as a surprise post on their timelines. These personalised caricatures really elevated the level of enthusiasm and gave an opportunity to MindShift to anchor a unique caricature video.

The results demonstrated the power of social media. The total number of tweets on the topic were 9,937, and timeline deliveries were to the tune of 17,229,339. There were 100-plus re-tweets for the personalised caricatures. Facebook postings crossed 2 lakh. The #MakesMeHappy video posted 5,547 views on YouTube. On Instagram it reached 2,40,000 views, while on Pinterest it touched 9,142.