The simple onion, which is cooked in many Indian homes every day, has also sparked a lot of discussion due to its high prices. Last month, it was priced at Rs. 80-100 a kilo, leading to jokes on Twitter. This ‘symbol of a struggling economy and rising inflation’ has now settled at about Rs. 60 a kilo, three times its usual price.
Despite the tough times, Groupon India has experienced some bright moments. The Indian branch of Groupon Inc., a major player in online deals, has capitalized on the current focus on onions in daily conversations. The deal site offered onions at Rs. 9 a kilo in a week-long promotion starting September 5, selling up to 3,000 kgs each day. In fact, the website even crashed after the onions sold out within just 44 minutes of the announcement!
The Groupon ‘onionified’ deal has been sold out for today within 9 minutes, while 14,499 deals have been bought so far. Now the site has put up a notice for deal hunters to come back tomorrow at 1PM. Interestingly, ‘onionified’ has also leveraged social media in a creative manner.
Onionify on social media
The deal was unveiled last week through a series of teaser updates on the Groupon India Facebook page.
This was simultaneously accompanied by a Twitter contest. Users have been asked to tweet funny with the hashtag #Onionify with a Google Nexus tab on offer. #Onionify tweets are still going strong and did even manage to trend in the top 10 India Twitter trends.
Win a Google Nexus Tab by participating in the #Onionify #Contest Tweet funny, tweet more.
— Groupon India (@GrouponIn) September 7, 2013
Onionify making news
For a deals site that has offers on restaurants, beauty, fashion and electronic goods on any given day, Groupon created a massive buzz with the first-of-its-kind onion deal. Apart from the social media promotions by way of contests and organic reach as one just can’t get enough of the buzz on onions, the Groupon onion deal has made big news. The highly discounted deal was covered by many major publications like the Wall Street Journal, Business Standard, The Economic times and many more. A screen shot of these articles now adorn the deal site at Groupon.
The contest on Twitter with #Onionify has managed to fuel a good amount of conversations on Twitter. As per Topsy (a social media conversations monitoring tool) for the period of Sept 6th until 9th 11 pm, #Onionify has generated more than 3K conversations and created an exposure of 2.79 million.
While we do not know the outcome of the rising onion prices on the upcoming elections, clever marketing around the staple onion has certainly ensured Groupon a wider reach and increased traffic, coupled with strengthening its deals branding.