Creative Commerce > Culture & Context

HAGGLEBOT

DENTSU WEBCHUTNEY, Bangalore / FLIPKART INTERNET PVT LTD / 2019

Awards:

Bronze Cannes Lions
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Overview

Credits

Overview

Background

India’s cultural diversity is now noticeable in everyday internet use. Flipkart, the e-commerce leader, realized its current users bear little resemblance to its next 100 million in every key metric, notably, income, internet maturity, brand engagement, and smartphone usage.

Now, 2018 was touted to be gloomy for the category. With Walmart’s record acquisition and reports of an impending industry-wide slowdown, the race to convert a trillion-dollar retail market online was in full swing. The competition — no less than the biggest company in the world Amazon.

India’s festival shopping season is centerstage for Flipkart in generating demand for its marquee online shopping event, The Big Billion Days (equivalent to Single’s Day and Black Friday). It’s a period where media buying determines success for the competition. With new users looming, Flipkart looked to the rise of voice apps in their daily use to put the spotlight on India’s pride while bargaining

Describe the creative idea

Introducing Hagglebot. The first-ever online market experience on Google Assistant.

It’s where Indians brought their bargaining best to set prices on products for the rest of India. Only this time, not over the counter, but over their resident voice assistant of choice.

In the lead up to the country’s biggest online shopping days, every time users instigated Google Assistant with ‘OK Google, talk to Flipkart,’ they could be crowned the country’s craftiest bargainer by Hagglebot. Flipkart challenged Indian hearts and minds in their quest to squeezing deals on top products, simulating the importance of feeling like they’re driving the value in a deal.

Instead of seeing another transactional checkout page, users were surprised with a completely gamified market. It was the only place in the world to satiate thrills of a bargain, and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to liberate India off its budget constraints.

Describe the strategy

Shopping in India hasn’t been the same since Flipkart started building disruptive, unique, and scalable solutions. The brand is credited with growing e-commerce to 5% of all retail. In order to grow engagement with the category, we had to.

1. drive interest for new users, while simultaneously exciting current users.

2. create a disruptive solution to nullify competition outspending us 4:1.

First, we identified the singular Indian insight: bargaining and haggling. The final price is a point of pride, no matter the size of purchase: from a hairpin up to a house. This set the foundation for the retail experience we could simulate.

Secondly, voice technology is proving to be a paradigm shift in computing, where it overcomes the barrier of typing for the next 100 million.

To deliver excitement, we decided to tap a latent desire from the category: to get a novel market experience online.

Describe the execution

Hagglebot had to learn every bargaining trick in the book. A 100-day design sprint encompassed learning the technology and the context in which wanted to be heard. 8 strategies were shortlisted after studying 30 Indian bazaars. We noticed Indians have a mental utility belt of responses to get to the best deal, and these responses set a robust foundation for the 8 universal product groups up for grabs.

Hagglebot was in business four days before The Big Billion Days. Immediately, Indians battled for the bargain of the year. Little did they expect, a voice experience that could scale from a 30-second interaction to an hour-long battle was ready for the best Indian bargains. We onboarded users with a pledge and a demo, prevented them from getting bored with brain teasers, and even offered words of motivation from their favourite celebrities to keep them going.

List the results

Flipkart managed to successfully redefine user expectations to create a branded experience that shattered records.

1. The average Google Assistant experience lasts for 2-3 seconds, but with an average engagement time of 6 minutes and 5 seconds, Hagglebot was the most engaging Google Assistant experience yet, worldwide.

2. Over 4 days, users bargained with us for over 75 days, indicating the right amount of depth in the experience.

3. India saved over $1.4 million on merchandise sold during The Big Billon Days, with average savings of over 50%. Flipkart’s total GMV of products bargained on Hagglebot was $1.23 million.

4. Flipkart achieved record-breaking numbers to emerge as the #1 player in the festive season. Flipkart’s CEO also emphatically claimed, “the competition is nowhere close. We had a 70% share this shopping season.”

All in all, Hagglebot is the most in-depth and immersive branded voice experience till date.

Please tell us about the social behaviour and/or cultural insights that inspired your campaign

Foremost, to account for every eventuality, we learned observed bargaining strategies like emotional blackmail and lowballing, and even understand commonly used Hinglish (Hindi & English) market phrases.

Assistant’s robust API and NLP was retrained for India in collaboration with Google Zoo Japan. Bargaining strategies like blackmailing and lowballing were handled with panache; GIFs and sounds helped recreate the feel of a shop. Even brownie points for words like “please” was built-in.

On D-Day, Hagglebot was ready for India. High abandonment rates, a known barrier for the tech, was finally overcome with clever integrations throughout the game. Market sound effects set the tempo. Straying from the bargaining script elicited Hagglebot’s dismay. All of this, in order to let 1200+ contextual responses shine, and let users finally take the spotlight. Ultimately, a scoring algorithm judged basis decisiveness, niceness, and stubbornness to definitively name India’s best bargainer.

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