After establishing its presence in 18 countries around the world, BlaBlaCar, an online marketplace that facilitates ride sharing, entered India in January 2015. However, despite being so new the brand has still managed to expand its presence in more than 700 cities in the country and has served over 3,00,000 fleets.
In an exclusive conversation with EE, Raghav Gupta, India Country Manager at BlaBlaCar reveals the marketing strategy of the brand, its experiential initiatives and plans down the road for the brand.
Q- What is the brand psychology behind Blablacar?
A-Blablacar enables travel for 2-3-4 people, who might be looking to reach Jaipur from Delhi or some other short or long distance in an arrangement, where one of them is a car owner and the others can’t get train or flight tickets at the last moment. Usually likeminded people find each other through Blablacar and there are a lot of conversations that happen over the journey so the psychology of the brand is to provide care pooling services with the generation of strong social experiences.
Q- The BlaBla Tour is an on ground initiative by Blablacar. Tell us more about it.
A- The BlaBlaTour is an activity where the BlaBlaCar Team takes a BlaBlaCar and drives across cities to interact and meet with its members at parties in each city known as 'BlaBlaTimes'. The idea behind the on ground campaigns of Blablacar is to play on the social experience that a user gets through the application use. At BlaBlaTimes we invite our members to come and meet our team, other members who ride and share BlaBlaCar and to get to know each other in a social gathering.
To break the ice we have a lot of games and engaging activities. Social media platforms are giving only digital experiences to customers today but as we operate through digital we at Blablacar also want to enhance the physical experience for our service users. The Blablabla times has already happened in Mexico, Europe, Turkey and was executed in six cities in India in July.
Q-What are some of the other experiential initiatives by BlaBlaCar?
A-Our target audience is young business professionals, students, business owners who travel a lot and hence use the services of BlaBlaCar. To cater to them we also partner with a lot of music festivals, especially with those where travel is involved. From coming October we will associate with a lot of such festivals and we also look forward to associating with college festivals that are majorly popular amongst the youth.
Q- What will be the marketing strategy of BlaBlaCar as far as ATL mediums are concerned?
A-. In terms of ATL, we have launched radio campaign recently in southern states and we have also launched a TV campaign in the same demographics as of now as these states are very important markets to us.
Once we know the results of these campaigns then we shall scale up the same throughout the country. We also have an advertising tie-up with IRCTC currently, so if anyone goes to book a ticket online they can see a contextual banner of Blablacars and use our services too if they are unable to get the ticket.
Q- Today there are multiple brands like Blablacar, who offer the services of ridesharing. So how is Blablacar different from them?
A-Blablacar is the largest ridesharing platform in the world and much like other large companies we know that there will be companies who will get inspired from us and sell services like us. But I think that at Blablacar our intention is to create strong social experiences for our customers, many of who end up as friends after the ride. And that for me is the difference between Blablacar and others.
