As Jeff Bezos arrives in India, Flipkart should worry about its customers, not Amazon

When Amazon boss Jeff Bezos lands in Bangalore today(28 September), he will receive a huge blast of ad campaigns from his rival Flipkart. The Indian online retailer, which recently got $1 billion of funding, an amount that Amazon quickly trumped by announcing a $2 billion investment kitty for India, has put up giant hoardings at Bangalore airport and on the highways to boost what it calls its Big Billion Day.

As The Times of India tells it, these hoardings have also been put up close to the Amazon India headquarters in Bangalore, and form a part of Flipkart’s “festive season sale campaign called Big Billion Day.” TOI suggests that this is part of Flipkart’s “Welcome Mr Bezos” campaign, apparently an effort to tell Bezos “we are bigger.”

The report also quotes Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal as saying that Bezos’ response to Flipkart is a “panic reaction to the fact that Amazon is not able to make any inroads in India. Our market share has increased in the last six months.”

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When Firstbiz enquired with Flipkart sources, it turned out that the ad campaign had little to do with Bezos’ arrival, and merely coincided with the Amazon boss’s arrival in India. However, Bansal’s quote suggesting that Amazon is panicking, gives us a slightly different nuance to the story. It seems the Bansals are also looking over their shoulders at what Amazon is upto.

We don’t know if Bezos is panicking or not, but Flipkart would do well to focus on its customers rather than its rival.

Companies win by listening and talking to their customers, not their rivals.And it does not matter if the rival is internal or external.

When Coke returned to India some two decades ago after buying up Ramesh Chauhan’s Thums Up, Limca and other brands, it put up a huge front page advertisement in newspapers where Thums up was shown welcoming Coke.

Coke did not do its brand any good with this boo-boo. No brand really gains by rubbishing another brand - even though competitive claims are not uncommon in brand warfare. In the Thums Up case, the Coke guys were doing nothing more than pandering to their own multinational egos by giving the subliminal message that Thums up was a desi brand and thus in awe of the firangi Coke.

To this day, Coke’s market share is nowhere near Thums Up’s.

The broader point is this. If the purpose of marketing (and business itself) is to find a customer, it makes no sense to show competitors who’s boss or even eulogise them (as in Coke’s case). Brands win by talking to their customers and not by making a point to rival brands and companies.

Brands may be owned by companies in legal terms, but they actually exist in the mind of the consumer. In a way, one can say that brands are effectively owned by their ardent fans and consumers. Harley Davidson seldom makes major changes in its iconic bikes without asking its customers what it thinks of them. Your brand can grow only with the permission or participation of your consumers.

So if Flipkart has done this campaign for any reason other than addressing its own customers, it would be a mistake. Even if it has done this to drown out the Amazon chatter that will begin in the media when Bezons lands in India, it would be pointless.

The media is not going to talk about Flipkart when it wants to talk to Bezos. Flipkart would do better by saving its firepower for its customers when Bezos leaves. One understands that Bezos is not here to settle down.