For anyone who still think that all marketing is good marketing , this start-up shows how users can squash you if your campaign manages to dis them off. Classic marketing which I would say is the usual advertising on media such as newspapers, TV was only one way communication. Whether you cringed whenever the ad for Colgate came on with the female reporter screeching “Kya aapka toothpaste mein namak hain” all you would do was change the channel. But now things have changed, social media marketing has changed the way marketing works with users responding to ads immediately, sharing them with their friends.

Into this world stepped Zomato and changed its homepage to this

They wanted engineers to apply for their Delhi office and Zomato was offering them usual perks for relocating to Delhi. It might have been a different story if they stopped there But Zomato went a step ahead and produced this…

Needless to say, this pissed off the techies in Bangalore, which is hailed as the Silicon Valley of India.Having lived there myself let me assure you..Bangalore wins that claim hands down.As the famous parable goes..

“If you throw a stone randomly in Bangalore, chances are it will hit a dog or a software engineer. While the dog may or may not have a strap around his neck, the software engineer will definitely have one”

So what do the Bangalore ans do?

They start trolling Zomato….They started uninstalling Zomato App from their mobile devices, give it the least possible rating on the app store and give it bad reviews.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking “Big deal!” Just to quantify, Zomato’s Anrdoid App Rating before the fiasco was 4.5 with 25696 votes & after was 4.3 with 25800 votes. (http://www.nextbigwhat.com/zomato-app-rating-trolled-297/)

When I first saw this picture on the news, I thought this was photo-shopped but nah, go to the app store and scroll down in the reviews section of Zomato app and you’ll find 1 star ratings with “Communal Divide”, “Stop Racism”, you get the idea.

Some tech enthusiasts felt this wasn’t enough and took to twitter with spoofs such as this..the following spoof reflects Zomato’s original color palette which it used for its marketing media

and tweets like these..

The reaction was unanticipated, who would have expected that a clever smart, humorous and sarcastic ad for hiring talent would result into this in less than a day. Zomato came up with an apology the very next day, which you can see on their home page. http://www.zomato.com/journal/were-crazy-not-stupid

The moral of this lengthy story is that marketing is not the same anymore, you’re going to get brickbats if you infuriate your consumers and they are not going to show an inch of mercy.Always remember that you playing on a levelled field in the social media and we are in the lateral world. Whether you are an upcoming start-up or a company with an established solid fan base, the days where we believe that just being talked about is marketing are far behind us.

Refer to #pappu for a thorough understanding.