BigRock: Proud Extension

The latest TVCs from the company promote .biz as the preferred domain for small businesses in India.

For businesses today, going digital is no more an experiment. It is rather a complete transformation in the ways an entrepreneur wants people to know about his services, which he is of course very proud of.

BigRock, an ICANN-accredited internet domain name registrar and web hosting company, has followed the similar philosophy in its latest television commercials that promote .biz as the preferred domain for small businesses in India. For launching its .biz domain service, BigRock has joined hands with Neustar, which manages the domain name registry for .biz. Since the launch of .biz in 2001, Neustar has been working to establish .biz as a one-stop solution to help businesses. BigRock is a part of DirectI Group, a global internet company with customers in more than 20 countries.

Conceptualised by Ideas@Work, the campaign comprises of two TV ads that go by the philosophy that every proud entrepreneur should have a .biz website for his business. The first TVC shows an entrepreneur who develops a lie-detector machine that helps to curb the growing rate of divorces. A prospective groom is questioned about his willingness to marry a girl and is also asked whether he is marrying her for her father's money. The groom lies and is caught. The owner then proudly says that his business has helped save 6,000 marriages so far. The TVC ends with a voiceover promoting the .biz offer.

The second TVC shows a proud Yoga class owner speaking about how she is serving the society by giving it back what her Guru has taught her. This TVC also ends with a voiceover promoting the .biz offer. Launched on June 17, the campaign will run on GECs and news channels for the next two weeks.

According to the company, the TVC is a part of the outreach campaign that bundles services like web hosting, hosted email for .biz domain and Google Adwords coupons worth Rs 2500, all of which are integrated with a website builder priced at Rs 199. Though the company did not divulge the media budget for this campaign, it states that the budget will be apportioned from its annual integrated marketing budget of Rs 10 crore.

Speaking to afaqs! about the objective behind this campaign, Shashank Mehrotra, general manager and business head, BigRock, states that the campaign is devised around the idea of telling entrepreneurs that addressable businesses should be online and should have a .biz business. "Owning a .biz extension is equivalent to the pride you attach to your business. This was done to set the local Indian context for the campaign," Mehrotra adds.

Smart start...

It is quite unusual to ask people to book an internet domain through a TVC, but BigRock has been doing it since its inception. Its first campaign broke on TV in 2011. Mehrotra adds that this is a way of evolution for the company and its target audience as well.

"In 2011, we started our marketing exercise on TV as we wanted to reach a large set of audience and it was not possible to do it on digital. Besides, in India, TV lends legitimacy to a brand and the recall is very strong. When we launched our campaign in 2011, we promoted the .com offering as we wanted to educate interested people about our offerings. People were consuming content at that time but were not very clear how to host content, and that is what we wanted to educate them about," explains Mehrotra.

BigRock first promoted .com offerings and later went on to promote its .org service through another set of TVCs. Till date, the company has launched about 14 TVCs to promote its services. In technical terms, each internet domain extension is known as TLD (top-level domain) and BigRock has been attaching an emotional quotient with each TLD offering advertised on TV.

"Our TVCs have now evolved along with our consumers and tend to communicate the one service that our consumers are searching for specifically," Mehrotra adds.

With each TVC, Mehrotra states that searches about the brand increase and there is also a surge in traffic and transactions experienced by the site. The website currently has 200,000 users in its registered user base.

Challenging domain?

Domain hosting services are the fundamental backbone of any website. These services specialise in providing domain-centric features, such as registering a domain and providing email addresses using the domain name. They also offer popular extras, like web hosting services, privacy features and domains using the latest extensions at a good price.

With more people buying domains every day, for everything from personal blogs to mom and pop restaurants, the number of domain hosting services is growing exponentially. However, according to BigRock, out of the 130 million internet users in India, there are only around 3 million domains booked in the country, which stands to around 2 per cent of the country's internet population. Whereas in China, there are 7 per cent domains as opposed to its internet population and for developed markets like the UK and the US, the number is as high as 25 per cent.

The primary competitors of the brand in India are global brand GoDaddy and the Indian company, Net4. For it, the marketing challenge in India lies around creating its own value proposition and educating the customers about its services. "We are presently in a position of evolution in our product journey phase. Thus our marketing is always focused on the creative and the content we communicate to our audience. With this sort of content, TV becomes the best medium for us to generate reach and it won't be possible with a text ad or a banner," Mehrotra informs.

BigRock plans to launch another TV campaign towards the end of this year to promote another set of services from its bouquet.

BigRock was started in 2010 and currently their products include domain registration, business-class email services, web-hosting services, website builder products, e-commerce solutions and digital certificates.