Driving hard on bloggers’ pitch.

At the launch of Mahindra & Mahindra’s latest SUV Xylo recently, many heads turned when the company’s top brass were seen extending the warmest welcome to two unassuming youth, who they said were bloggers.
"Wonderful work young men," one of them was overheard telling Karthi Annamalai and Shrawan Raja.
The gesture, which stood out in a room full of journalists, was a clear acknowledgment from the maker of Bolero that in the days to come, as Indian consumers get tech savvy and scan the Web for reviews about brands, opinion makers on the Web would matter much more.
Small wonder Xylo’s pre-launch marketing campaign on the Web took cognisance of bloggers and auto enthusiasts from across the country. With the help of the likes of Annamalai and Raja, M&M created a Web campaign of sorts with a strong blogger’s pitch.
Annamalai explains why.
"Automakers are relying on bloggers to get a better understanding of their products and using blogging as an interface with the end consumer," he says.
Ritu Madbhavi, vice-president, Interface Interactive, the ad agency behind Xylo, says it provided information to bloggers interested in writing about automobiles. "These bloggers are very knowledgeable and have a strong point of view. But at times their blogging may be hampered because they do not have access to all the information," she adds.
Interface Communications kick-started it all through a teaser campaign a month before the vehicle’s launch.
A website, mahindraxylo.co.in, was created that provided product videos and information. Certain videos were released exclusively to select auto blogs and anticipating the launch, blogposts and discussions gathered steam on sites such as Wheelosphere.org, Indian Auto Blog, Wheelsunplugged.com and Indianautomobile.com.
However, the idea to use bloggers pitch to their advantage must be a tough task for manufacturers given that bad reviews from bloggers travel much faster than the good ones.
Naveen Ravindran from Interactive Interface says, "Monitoring the Web is the key. We scan the Web with various specialty tools everyday and have to go through a very complex process to understand where and what masses are speaking the most, and then decide on ways to communicate."
Soon after the first blog posts, curiosity and debate about the Xylo turned viral as auto enthusiasts across the country began blogging about it too, followed by communities on websites like Orkut and Facebook.
"We wanted to brand it in such a way that before people term it a multi-purpose vehicle, they accept it as a car that can be a disco on wheels, a camper’s haven or a simple family car," says Vivek Nayar, SVP, marketing (automotive), M&M.
M&M claims the Xylo website registered 1,74,708 total visits with 9,651 entries for the ‘Win a Xylo contest’, 3,518 requests for updates on Xylo and 2,543 requests for test drives. Xylo’s online campaign is indicative of the fact that the power of using Web and bloggers is catching up amongst auto makers.
Annamalai says, "Toyota and Maruti Suzuki also used this space extensively to create a pre-launch hype for Corolla and A-star, respectively. Apart from actively pursuing bloggers, M&M also tracked the comments that readers posted on our blogs. The intention was to understand the consumer psyche and incorporate their suggestions to improve the vehicle in the future."