A couple of years back, I remember sitting in the Google Mumbai office and talking to the head of Marketing of Google India on what TG they should target for faster adoption of its GMail offering. Then, without batting an eyelid, I said ‘Youth’. If the same question were asked to me now, the answer would be the same but with a few more caveats and sentences thrown in.
A few months after that discussion (or probably a year), AOL India launched its own mail platform, and looking at the TVC’s it was pretty obvious they were targeting the same set we had talked about.
Orkut I thought, went a step ahead and changed when it changed its logo when it was given an Youth icon award by MTV. Now, they have added an app called Sony Ericsson MTV Roadies Battleground. I am not averse to having 3rd party apps on Orkut, some of them I think are exceptional. What turns me off in the above app is the blatant branding (where are adversitement/sponsored link text next to this banner??) and use of words ‘powered by orkut’. Did I say that the logo looks like it is a new product from Mozilla.
What I foresee happening is that the Google India team in its quest of getting higher user and activity numbers is targeting the Youth with extremely shoddy short term marketing partnerships and strategies.
These youth might not be what the marketers advertising on Orkut are targeting in the first place. And then, the bigger issue which will happen according to me is the mass migration of Orkut users to other niche social networks depending on their needs.
