It launched a new television campaign on January 10, anchored around the theme “Every Trip Has A Purpose”. (View commercial below)
CEO Hrush Bhatt shares the inspiration behind the campaign. “While we were brainstorming marketing approaches internally, we thought it would be interesting to change what our marketing is focused on. Most travel marketing focuses on price, say the price of an airline seat; but that’s the worst part of travel!
“Survey after survey has shown that travellers consider flying to be one of the worst aspects of travel. So, we thought maybe we should shift the focus away from the airline seat and to why you got into the seat in the first place. Why are you traveling?
“Then, when we invited agencies to come and pitch, one of them, Publicis, came in with a script that was also focused on the “Why” instead of the price. It was a script set in an airport with a tag line that read “Everyone travels for a reason”.
“Publicis won the pitch for our business and as we continued to discuss the idea with them, it morphed from the original script they presented at the pitch into the concept that was finally made into a commercial.”
The television campaign was executed with “no sets, no scripts and no actors”, said Cleartrip in its blog.
Emmanuel Upputuru, the ad agency’s creative director, had this to say: “Cleartrip is the gutsiest client I have met. Who would send out an agency and a production house without an approved script and cast, forget costumes and locations? Is it the best example of co-creation?”
Hrush said he hoped the new campaign would “help position the Cleartrip brand as a brand that goes beyond just transaction processing”.
“We’ve never been passionate about travel because it’s a large category online, we’re passionate about it because travel is such a fundamental part of human progress; and we hope this campaign helps communicate our commitment to all types of travellers everywhere.”
On the outlook for 2011, Hrush said it was still too early to tell how the year would pan out. “We have already invested extensively in mobile during the second half of 2010 and we will continue that investment in 2011. We plan to continue to expand Cleartrip into new markets this year as well,” he said.
In late January, Cleartrip started testing a new navigation design in SmallWorld, its travel search site, moving away from text to images and icons and paving the way for mobile devices.
In its blog, it said, “Text links as primary navigation have served us well, but last year, we began thinking that text based navigation has limits; and that those limits are imposed by the device(s) being used to navigate our web site and products.
“So, while text links work perfectly well as a navigation system for people using desktop or laptop browsers, they don’t work so well when designing for people using mobile devices or tablet devices. Smaller screens have far less real estate available and text links take up too much of that precious real estate, making them impractical.”
The company says it is starting to get more and more users consuming the Internet from advanced Post-PC devices such as iPhones or Android-based smartphones and tablets such as the iPad.
“Research by Morgan Stanley indicates that in 2010, more than 20% of the world’s mobile subscribers had fast 3G connections. In addition, Morgan Stanley estimates that there will be more Post-PC devices sold in 2012 than traditional PCs.
“The writing on the wall couldn’t be clearer – we had to start thinking about how our products and navigation systems should be designed for the coming era of Post-PC devices.”
Hrush said 2010 ended very well for the company. “We’re very happy with the progress the business has demonstrated in financial terms and with respect to the product portfolio.”
As for what’s next and if it is planning an IPO, Hrush said, “No comment.”
