"Friends, Indians, Countrymen, lend us your Voice" Innovative e-Mail Campaign by Ola Scooters India!

"Any Publicity is good publicity including bad Publicity". Often used in Marketing, Publicity and awareness is the bloodline for any product/company. “Hate me or love me but don’t ignore me” is the Clarion call of modern marketers. 

Getting customer eyeballs is becoming exorbitant with the fragmented media and falling customer attention spans. Attentions spans are down to 8 seconds! It has become increasingly difficult to get into the customer's mind!

One product that got lot of free publicity, media coverage and enormous goodwill and built up curiosity among the general public was the “Nano” the world’s cheapest car, touted at a price of Rs 1,00,000/- rupees. 

The breakthrough rock-bottom pricing caught the world media attention and reams and reams worth of articles were written in newspaper and many Zillion gigabytes worth of TV shows and reviews were telecast about “The Nano”, All free!

After many years another product category that has caught the imagination of the Indian Public is the e-Scooter range on offer from Ola. 

The same type of hype is being built up and consumers are hungry to hear, see and learn about the new revolutionary scooter that promises to change the way we commute, especially on two wheelers in India.

Ola is cashing in on the hype. Today Ola has sent e-mailers to all its customers (existing Ola users). The first slide of the advertisement says “Friends, Indians, Countrymen” and the second slide says “Lend us your voice”. Does it ring a bell? 

Yes, it does, the words are from Mark Anthony’s speech when he pleads with the Romans to rise up against the murderers of Julius Caesar. Mark Anthony says “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears”.

Coming back to the Ola e-Mail, written below the second slide is the request, “The in-built AI-powered Voice Assistant on the revolutionary Ola S1 frees you from having to manually input instructions on the scooter's interface. 

To bolster this capability, we're collecting voice samples - across age groups, genders, accents, and even pitches. We would like a sample of your voice to make our scooter smarter. Thank you, and welcome to the revolution, for good”.

Wonderful way to engage and keep connected with the present and prospective customers. Valuable lesson to all marketers as to how to stay active in customer’s mind! As they say out of sight, out of mind!