Launched in 2007, BookMyShow is India's largest online entertainment ticketing platform covering categories such as movies, live events, sports, plays, and others. Moreover, the company covers extensive content around entertainment on its platform and runs Jukebox – an audio entertainment service to stream and download the latest music and podcasts.
To know about the journey of BookMyShow, we interviewed Harsh Pamnani, who is an MBA from XLRI Jamshedpur and author of the bestselling book Booming Brands (published by CNBC). In his book, he has covered inspiring journeys of many new age ‘Made in India’ brands, including BookMyShow.
***
Debayan: Tell me why you covered BookMyShow in your book?
Harsh: BookMyShow is the category leader. It is India’s largest online entertainment ticketing platform. In its decade long journey, BookMyShow has achieved phenomenal growth. Hence, I was curious to know about the brand’s inspiring journey and marketing strategies.
Debayan: Tell me a little about how BookMyShow got started?
Harsh: Around 1999, a young MBA graduate from Sydenham (SIMSREE), Mumbai – Ashish Hemrajani, had started his career with an advertising firm in Mumbai. Once, Ashish was in South Africa for a holiday. He was sitting under a tree and happened to listen to a radio commercial promoting tickets for rugby. Listening to this commercial, he thought, he could also replicate this model in India and thereby solve a problem that many people like him faced.
To share the context of the problem, at that time, people in India used to stand in queues for hours for movie tickets. Sometimes, they used to miss movies because of shows getting houseful or used to get tickets at a very high price due to black marketing. Also, there was no organized platform to market movies, events, and plays.
Believing in the potential of his idea, Ashish quit his two-year-old first job, and along with his friends Parikshit Dar and Rajesh Balpande, he co-founded India’s first entertainment ticketing company - Go4ticketing.com, which became a sub-brand belonging to Hindustan Times’ portal Go4i.com. Later on, the company became Indya Tickets, a sub-brand belonging to STAR Network's portal Indya.com. The business growth, however, was short-lived. By 2002, the dotcom bubble had burst, and Ashish's business was almost shut.
The period of 2002 to 2007 was a rough phase for the company, and it managed to survive by selling ticketing software and providing back-end ticketing services to cinema theatres. In 2007, seeing the growth in multiplexes, increased credit & debit cards adoption, and internet penetration, Ashish and his team planned their comeback and launched BookMyShow, India's first online entertainment ticketing aggregator.
Debayan: BookMyShow is one of the most popular internet brands in India. How did the team come up with this name?
Harsh: You might imagine that this iconic name would have been coined by some advertising or branding firm. But you'd be wrong if you thought that. Birth of the brand name BookMyShow is a good example of how every person in the company can be important, and how little efforts can ultimately pay off in very big ways.
In 2007, the company organized an internal contest to coin a name for the new brand. The prize for the contest winner was an iPod touch. Interestingly, an engineering intern came up with the name BookMyShow.com.
You may read our previous interview with Harsh here, where he spoke about the evolution of Paper Boats.
Debayan: Can you tell me about one of the marketing strategies that contributed to the growth of BookMyShow?
Harsh: I have covered many interesting strategies in my book
. Here, let me share with you the concept of marketability and its application in the context of BookMyShow. Marketability means the attractiveness or appeal of an idea, product, or service. There are various drivers that facilitate marketability. Different drivers of marketability work during different stages of business, in different markets and in different cultures.
One of the drivers of marketability is discounts. Earlier on, when the business was new, and customers had not tried the product, BookMyShow ran discounts to build a critical mass. But in the long run, giving discounts is not a viable strategy because a fine balance between price and quality has to be maintained.
Another driver of marketability is the product. BookMyShow has continuously worked to improve the product from multiple dimensions such as search functionality, buying experience, frictionless payment process, etc. It has added many new features on its platform, such as relevant content, pre-booking concessions at discounted prices, food coupons, split cost, and others, to name a few.
One more driver of marketability is the variety. BookMyShow has been continuously increasing the breadth and depth of entertainment options for its customers. It has listings of almost all major events, plays, and sports in every major city and at many timings.
Over a period of time, its partnerships have become the driver of marketability. It has partnered with all major banks and payment gateways that keep on running offers for their customers on transactions through its platform. Additionally, BookMyShow Corporate Solutions — the B2B wing of the company partners with corporates for their customized entertainment voucher requirements for promotional activities, employees' rewards, lead generation, and other incentives.
One more driver of marketability is customers' evangelism. Some time back, the company introduced its first-ever benefits program 'BookMyShow Superstars.' As part of this program, the company identifies a base of its most loyal customers and offers them a wide variety of rewards and benefits such as gift vouchers, free movie seat upgrades, access to exclusive premier invitations for movies, and so on.
There is a lot more to add, but I will end my answer with a quote from Ashish. He says, "If you keep on doing the same thing better, you might become efficient in that thing. But your competitors will keep on doing new things, and your customers' expectations will keep on evolving. Keep pushing the envelope, try new things to improve marketability of your product."
Debayan: Ticket is a commoditized product as customers don’t need to look at and feel tickets before buying. I am curious to know how BookMyShow has been able to differentiate itself in such business?
Harsh: Good question! Selling tickets may look like a business of selling commoditized products. But it’s actually a business of providing differentiable service. In 1999, when Ashish started his first venture, within a short span of time, 21 competitors emerged, and the market became highly competitive. Rather than worrying too much about the competition, Ashish and the team focused on enhancing customer experience. In its early years, the company started buying a fixed amount of tickets inventory and sold that to customers through its 15 call centers. To add further value and provide reliable options, these call centers were operational 24x7 and had an easy dial-in numbers.
As customers were not able to pay online or in advance, the company had staff to hand over tickets on a cash-on-delivery (COD) basis. Ashish focused on getting his team trained in every aspect of customer service, such as greeting customers when they used to call at the call center to branding ticket envelopes to getting ready before delivering tickets to them. For example, the ticket delivery boy used to remove his helmet, comb his hair, wear the company cap and tabard, and then used to meet customers. Nowadays, these things look normal, but in 1999-2000, they became differentiating factors for the company. Along with the evolution of technology, the company has also evolved and has moved from manual process to automated ticketing process at cinemas and multiplexes.
BookMyShow’s website and app have been recognized as extremely user friendly, interactive, educative, and intuitive. Interestingly, BookMyShow’s website doesn't require a customer to sign in. Instead of signing in first and then moving ahead for the transaction, a customer can go through the regular ticketing flow for selecting the movie, theatre, show, and seat of choice; proceed to the payments page and then confirm its details by providing email id & mobile number. The email id & mobile number information captured at the end are used for confirming the transaction and sending the ticket. BookMyShow app was praised as one of the best apps of 2017 on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store and has crossed 50 million downloads.
Also, BookMyShow became the first Indian online ticketing brand to participate in the WhatsApp business pilot. As part of this test, BookMyShow has made WhatsApp a default ticket confirmation channel for all its users. The list of innovations by the company to enhance its customers' experience is endless. Because of its focus on customer experience, BookMyShow has been awarded as the best omnichannel customer experience brand.
Debayan: Can you share one piece of advice that Ashish Hemrajani shared with you for Booming Brands’ readers?
Harsh:Actually, Ashish has given multiple advice. One of them is, rather than worrying too much about the external factors, focus on the things that are in your control. Don’t complain about the environment, just keep changing and adapting.
***
Harsh Pamnani With Ashish Hemrajani, Founder & CEO - BookMyShow