6 brilliant holiday marketing campaigns by Indian brands

Holidays always witness a surge in marketing efforts. Thousands of brands attempt to spread awareness and drive sales by releasing campaigns that leverage the festive spirit present during holidays. But while most of them simply focus on advertising their latest sales and offers, a few brands appeal to people's emotions as a way to generate engagement instead. And these brands are often the ‘winners’ in the competition to acquire more customers during holidays. Take a look at the following examples to see how your brand can make the most of a popular holiday to create a marketing campaign that works:

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Amazon

Tapping into the cultural truths behind a festival and then creating a heart-warming and widely relatable message is guaranteed to win any brand brownie points. Amazon India's #AdjustNoMore Diwali campaign does just that. Revolving around the theme of sacrifices family members make for each other, one campaign video shows a daughter tricking her hardworking father, who always puts her needs before his own, into buying a new phone for himself. The popular campaign served as an excellent way to cement Amazon in people's mind just before the brand kicked off its Great Indian Festival sale.

SnapDeal

SnapDeal's #CelebrateDiwaliHeroes campaign spread awareness by evoking one of the strongest emotions in the human sentiment arsenal — sympathy. The campaign highlighted the fact that Diwali is just another working day for military personnel, doctors, chefs, and fire fighters, while everyone else is celebrating it with their families. SnapDeal urged everyone to remember those people during the festive season and brighten up their Diwali by giving them gifts. An inherently likeable endeavour, the campaign served as the perfect backdrop to SnapDeal's #UnboxDiwali sale.

eBay

Deviating from the unimaginative advertisements that have tried, and failed, to tackle the myriad stereotypes prevalent in Indian society, eBay India's #ThingsDontJudge campaign knocked it out of the park. Their campaign video had a simple message — “eBay has products that don’t judge you for who you are or what you believe in. They say just one thing – live and let live!” Showing snippets of a man dancing with ghungroos, a woman riding a bike, older men taking selfies while pouting, and a man proposing marriage to his male partner, the video tied it together with the message that while all these things may still not be acceptable in Indian society, the 10 crore products on eBay allow you to unapologetically be who you are.

Flipkart

While most e-commerce sites advertise discounts and offers on gifts during Valentine's Day, Flipkart focused on increasing engagement using GIFs instead. As a part of their #FlipkartGifDelivery campaign, the company hosted a vast collection of relatable and entertaining GIFs focusing on all kinds of relationships, be it with a spouse, partner, pet, family member, or friend. The instant appeal of the GIFs, some of which subtly featured Flipkart without seeming pushy, resulted in a lot of people sharing it on social media sites which naturally boosted Flipkart's reach and engagement to a vast audience.

Penguin

Puns have always proven to be a hit among audiences of all kinds. And who does wordplay better than a publishing house? Penguin India's Valentine's Day campaign, which bore the hashtags #PunnyValentine and #LoveInOtherWords, featured a series of cute graphics with captions like ‘I toadaly love you’ and ‘You've got me booked’. The brand then followed it up with another series of graphics which asked users to select which fictional character would make their ideal Valentine date. Needless to say, the campaigns proved to be immensely popular among social media users.

Practo

It's always going to be difficult for a brand in the healthcare domain to disseminate light-hearted content, particularly on Valentine's Day. But Practo did just that with its #HealthyBreakups campaign this year. In a series of dainty visuals that featured graphics like a heart breaking up with french fries, and a pair of lungs breaking up with a cigarette, Practo pushed a pro-health message in an engaging and creative manner. The campaign, which also urged users to send their own healthy breakups, was understandably a huge success and received a ton of engagement on social media.

Marketers can learn a thing or two about creating effective holiday marketing campaigns from these brands — increase awareness, engagement, and likeability first, only then can you increase sales.