Besides being a fan of Zomato's largely consistent marketing and advertising, I also particularly like how Zomato's marketing efforts are closely tied to its CEO, Deepinder Goyal. Particularly when it comes to PR and corporate communications, Deepinder puts himself in the forefront more often than not, and that too, in difficult situations when most organizations would rather let the brand logo do the talking.
This happened when Zomato rolled back the inadequately planned green-red 1/5
2/5 uniforms for its delivery personnel in March 2024. The first retraction came from Deepinder's Twitter handle and the brand handle retweeted it the next day. This makes sense since it was Deepinder who went to town announcing the new feature!
When Zomato goofed on the 'Kachra' ad in June 2023, Deepinder didn't have any say in it. It was the brand handle that apologized and announced that they are withdrawing the ad.
Last week, when a user pointed that Zomato had started charging Rs.2 for a
3/5 user enabling 'Veg. mode', he had tagged both Zomato and Deepinder. And he had also tagged Swiggy while thanking it for 'treating users equally'!
Conventional corporate communications counsel would be to let the corporate handle respond to this, particularly since a prominent rival is tagged. But that would also seem like corporate-speak because there's only so much emotion you can put into the words of a lifeless logo.
Instead, the response for this snafu was by Deepinder himself, in the
5/5 Not many corporate leaders can pull such a thing, and it helps that Deepinder has consistently built his online persona for direct-speak. That prior context helps him do a lot more than most leaders who have to hide behind corporate-speak.
#PR #publicrelations #corporatecommunications #communications
Karthik S