This technique is really about observing the craft of some of the best marketers that you know of and studying their work to see what you can learn about their intent from the stories and from the communication that they launch. In this case the observation is not made so much from a consumer's lens but from a marketers lens. I call this process reverse marketing.
And it works similar to how you would reverse engineer a product or a process to see exactly what works and what doesn't work. I've taken many sessions on reverse marketing and I can tell you firsthand that the kind of impact that it creates on participants is tremendous. The kind of learning that they get, the kind of growth that they see in their own perspective, it's something to behold.
And therefore I'm very very happy that we're now taking a portion of that content from offline to online and it's going to be available to you for you to benefit from. So let's get started. We're now going to look at a few campaigns and break down what the business objective was, who the viewer for that ad was and what was the associated communication challenge.
Sound interesting? Let's get to it. The first campaign that we're going to break down today is from the e-commerce category, specifically a campaign that Amazon launched back in 2015. Now a little bit of context here from a global e-commerce space. By 2014, Amazon had won the US market in terms of e-commerce quite conclusively but had lost out to Alibaba in China in a major way.
Amazon as a company you might know is a really ambitious company. And so the China loss was a substantial loss for them. And they were very, very keen to make India work at that point.
In fact, India was seen as this next frontier that is going to drive growth in e-commerce for Amazon for years and years to come. The mandate that the Amazon India leadership team at that point in 2014 got from their global counterparts was that we needed to win in India. no matter what the cost, almost.
You might remember reading some of these headlines in middle of 2014 where Flipkart, in order to counter the Amazon threat, had raised $1 billion as a fundraise. And then immediately, almost 24 hours after that announcement, Amazon announced that they were now going to invest $2 billion in their India business in order to tap into the e-commerce growth. Seemed as if there were billions flying about in the Indian e-commerce space everywhere you looked at it and it was in this context that Amazon launched its Or Dikhaav campaign. Have a look at this campaign and then we will apply reverse marketing principles to it.
Anywhere, dress, shoes, handbag, costume, watch, jewelry. Okay, now that you've seen the campaign, the first step in the reverse marketing process is always to identify what was the business objective of the brand team that had launched this campaign. Business objective is nothing but the source of growth that the brand team envisions. where is the growth exactly going to come from to figure out what the business objective for a brand is going to be a useful place to start is the growth equation which has essentially three components to it that respect Determine what the business objective of a brand could be so this is what a growth equation looks like So you start by first figure out the number of people available in a given market or geography You multiply that by the percentage of people who consume your brand and that's called penetration percent You multiply that by the frequency with which they consume your brand how often they consume your brand and that's called frequency of consumption And then you multiply that by how much they consume in a given order location and that's called average weight of consumption.
Now you multiply all of these things you get the size of the brand or if you're using category penetration you get the size of the category. One thing you would notice here is that I have assumed that the pricing is constant here. If you're gonna play around with pricing then that comes as an additional lever in the growth equation but just to keep things simple for now I've kept price as constant. The reason this equation is so useful is because it narrows down business objectives. to one of three possibilities.
Either a brand is trying to drive penetration or frequency or average rate of purchase. There are only three possibilities to start thinking about a business objective.