Every year, thanksgiving sale in the United States is driven
by long sleepless queues, bulk shopping and a literal loot of stores offering
great discounts. Many immigrants decide to shop for the annual wishlist during
such sales and literally the entire racks are emptied to the shopping carts. It’s
a different issue that these goods make their way to ebay and best deals
websites. To give Indians a flavor of this historic day, Flipkart introduced
the big billion day on 6th October. The date signifies the flat
number when the Bansal brother started Flipkart(610) . To what would would have
been the biggest marketing event of the decade became a PR nightmare for the
duo. Deals were available for Rs.1 and most of the discounts were at 50-80%
category. Deals were updated frequently
and everywhere hour and were bought by people in 2-3 minutes of starting the
sale. The rivals were not silent.Snapdeal came up with similar prices to tackle
the sales and attracted the audience. Things started to go wrong when the
servers crashed, people kept trying for better deals and technology was the
biggest barrier for flipkart. Apart from this, there were complaints about
incorrect pricing and fake checkouts by people – this was because with the best
internet connection also, deals were over by the time they reached the cart. An
interesting way how Amazon demonstrated its sale was to show the number of
units that have been blocked hence the users wouldn’t spend time if they know
that the product has very low probability to be obtained.
Tuesday, 7 October 2014
Wednesday, 11 June 2014
Are you paying more for your pizza?
 |
| Dominos Pizza Old menu. Compare it with the new one to see price difference |
So how much do you pay for that cheese burst pizza at Dominos Pizza? It cost me 455 for a non veg medium and cheese crust pizza, the last time I ordered. The tax, another Rs.1oo. The pizza that cost Rs.380 a year back has increased a good 20%, but doesn’t anyone complain? Nope. Its Khushiyon ki home delivery.
A simple math calculation would tell you that an increase in 20% is equivalent to a decrease by 16.66%. Hence every day you should be getting a minimum discount of 15% on all pizzas, considering inflation last year and this year doesn’t affect the raw materials so much. And it’s sad, you don’t. Instead the price rise is equalized by a increase in promotional offers for one day in the week like 25% off on Wednesday and you start getting a feeling that it’s a customer centric company. Boo.
How silly can the online ordering get?
Dominos Pizza is really trying to push people to start ordering
online by a large number of offers which are
applicable only if you order online/mobile. The rationale behind this is I believe the
company’s motive to reduce the number of people who would want to come to the
stores and eat hence saving rent space and infrastructure costs. A clever
customer would always pre-order his pizza online, pick it up from the counter
and sit and eat there.
Twitter & Facebook Contests:
Last week, Dominos ran a contest where in the last reply to a tweet would receive a prize. Followers aimlessly tweeted wanting to be the last person. The catch here, they didn’t specify the timeframe. Tweets & messages were received even after 2 days. The winner has not yet been declared, another set of angry customers. The last comment was a few seconds before this blog was being uploaded.
Twitter & Facebook as a consumer forum:
Yes, more than social networking, these sites are used by
consumers to voice their opinion. But apart from their posts, there have been
no attempts to listen to complaints, grievances.Bad one again.
The brand is really good, and I really love their service, and
i seriously hope the management takes some steps towards not losing its
existing customer base through these intelligent marketing moves. After all,
yeh public hain,sab jaanti hai
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