How to screw up your brand image - Case Study Maruti

The Maruti WagonR Think Big Challege is a perfect case study of how a company can screw up their brand image.

As someone who loves to work on ideas I got excited when I came to know that Maruti WagonR is conducting a Think Big Challenge. As per the challenge you submit your ideas and if your idea wins you get a cash price of 10 lakh + Maruti WagonR + Venture funding. Wow sounds exciting right... It got my adrealin pumping and I started putting my bulk of time and energy to participate in this contest.

They had assigned scores for submitting the idea, gathering votes, physical form submission and personal interaction. Fair enough right.
   
After submitting my idea I got a sms asking me to participate in a selling activity, well read Personal Interaction. I eagerly went to their site to know what the selling activity was all about as this activity has a score of 20 points.

They provide two options to prove your selling skills.

Option 1

We need to know about the features of WagonR and mock sell it to their own representative for which we get 10 points and for the next 10 points we need to send a prospect to visit your office.

Option 2

We get complete 20 points by producing a photocopy of the invoice or booking details of a WagonR car sold or booked between December 21 – 27, 2009 only.

Isn't that a shit of a joke. Selling different products requires different abilities. A car sales person may not be able to sell insurance, an insurance sales person may not be able to sell a FMCG product an FMCG sales person may not be able to sell a computer as each of them requires a differnet mindset. Well is Maruti trying to hire sales people by this activity???

The biggest joke is that if we get a photocopy of invoice how do they check my sales skills if that was their real intention in the first case. Doesn't this make the entire exercise a crap and purely a gimmick to get more footfalls and sales of WagonR.

This brand building activity of Maruti has done more damage to their brand than any good. I wonder how they will react once their ill conceived idea goes in mainstream media. Please remember each of the participants had spent considerable amount of time to participate in this event. I wish they could compensate us for the time we spent believing in their big idea.

In case they were short of ideas to improve their sales leads atleast they could have contact me and i would have been happy to help them out. No I am not kidding visit my idea www.bit.ly/smarti a gadget designed to help car owners have a fuel and maintenance free car and please don't forget to vote LOL. If that was not the best idea at least it was better than the crap they are trying to do.

Hope this posting reaches to someone who can really Think Big at Maruti.

Ram

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