Is Domino's Pizza the favorite Indian festival food?

Seriously! Take a look at this...

While you were celebrating new year's, the rest of the country was busy ordering Domino's pizza! Facts for your perusal:

Hottest searches in India on 30-Dec-2010 (via Google) – No Domino's
Hottest searches in India on 31-Dec-2010 (via Google) – "Domino's India" on #13
Hottest searches in India on 01-Jan-2011 (via Google) – "Domino's India" on #13
Hottest searches in India on 02-Jan-2011 (via Google) – No Domino's

(That most of the country was also searching for SMS spam to send on New Year is a separate story!)

Now take a look at the weeks for which "Domino's" related searches have peaked – correlates pretty well with major Indian festivals.

A cursory glance at other fast food chains, like McDonald's, Pizza Hut, & KFC also reveals a peak around the new year. However, nothing seems to rock the Indian palette on a festival as Domino's pizza! I, too, had ordered Domino's pizza on Christmas eve last year. What about you? Hungry kya?

Update: And the trend continues. Check out the huge spike in search volume for "dominos india" on Google Insights in the week of Holi (20-26 March, 2011)

"Frandship" requests - finally an explanation!

As a collective people, either we Indians are way ahead in the relationship curve or completely messed up! The top 5 "how to" queries via Google's India Zeitgeist are either highly insightful or very, very worrying!

• People want to impress girls first, then they think about improving their English. Wanting to make frandship with you, anyone?
• So people want to know how to get pregnant before they kiss. That explains the 1.3% population growth rate, twice that of China and higher than the world average.
• More people want to learn how to kiss before they impress the girl. An explanation for the rising crime rate against women?
• And reducing weight is at the very end of the relationship priority. Explains the omnipresence of pot-bellies around the nation.

There are more gems hidden there. What can you spot?

How a small change in link text led to 45% increase in customer re-engagements

The emails given below were sent to customers who hadn't been transacting on Cleartrip's site for a long time – potentially lost customers. We wanted to understand why they weren't transacting with us any more through a one question survey.

One of the emails received 45% more survey responses than the other. Can you guess which one?

One link-off read Spare a minute to let us know ».

The other, Answer one simple question & let us know »

Both the links reinforced the fact that the survey was short and would not take very long to complete. Yet, it was the second link text – "Answer one simple question & let us know" – which led to more responses.

That's right. One small change led to a 45% increase in lost customers re-engaging with our brand & giving us an opportunity to win them back.

Any theories as to why the second text performed better? Respond in the comments below.

The email salutation was personalized with the recipient's first name. The only difference in the email templates was the text of the link which led to a very short survey form - everything else was identical.

Contest design - Part 3 of Behind Cleartrip's My Purpose Microsite

Part 2 of this series told the story of how we iterated over the visual design of Cleartrip's My Purpose microsite. This part describes the design of the contest & user-flows.

What's in it for me?

Sharing holidays pics, party pics, and status updates on Facebook/Twitter has become part of a person's online identity. Because of the network effect – the (almost) omni-presence of one's friends on such networks – a person wants to share bits of his/her life online.

It would be naive to expect users to find such a value through our campaign microsite – in all of 4-weeks. We were asking users to share personal travel experiences with us, without giving them anything tangible or intangible in return.

We took an easy route to fill this gap – a contest.

Behind Cleartrip's My Purpose Microsite - Part 2

Part 1 of this series detailed the overall context of Cleartrip's TV campaign and the thought that went into outlining the online strategy for it. With just 12 days for the ads to go on-air we had to get our heads down and focus on execution – starting from the visual design of the microsite.

Visual & interaction design

Truth be told, no design process is linear. In a textbook world every process fits into a neat diagram like this.

In the real world, it's more like this.

Courtesy: The Anatomy of Web Design

Fresh off the block

And that's precisely what happened with this microsite. The brilliant chaps at Synapse, our digital agency based in Goa, got all charged-up. They spent the weekend working off a half-baked brief based around a bunch of ideas that we had been bouncing off each other.

One of the first mockups of the microsite looked something like this.

While it drew inspiration from the right products & tried to neatly package the ideas that we had bounced off each other, this approach didn't work for mainly two reasons:

Behind Cleartrip's My Purpose Microsite - Part 1

Inception

Online travel as a category is extremely cluttered. MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, Yatra, Travelocity, TravelGuru, iXiGO, goIbibo, Aarzoo - the list just doesn't seem to end. Marketing communication for online travel is even more cluttered & undifferentiated. Each & every player is talking about essentially the same things - deals, cashbacks, & discounts. It's a race to the bottom to be the place for cheapest deals.

Given this competitive environment, Cleartrip wanted to go out with a fresh communication to break this clutter. We wanted to take a more "human" approach with our communication. Something that connects with customers at a level "higher" than prices & discounts.

With this background & brief, we called for agency pitches to create our TV commercial. I sat through all the pitches. Some were good. Some not so. But, the one that we finally went with, had a brilliant insight - every trip has a purpose. Think about it. Travel is more about meeting your relatives, going for your honeymoon, or clinching that business deal than it's about the price you bought the ticket for. As a travel service provider, we enable our customers to fulfill an actual purpose. To quote Hrush from the Cleartrip blog: