GOOGLE PAY
Gamification that went viral
Marketing campaign during festive times used to engage and reward users. Collect 5 stamps and win ₹251 and get a chance to win ₹1 lakh.
ROLE
User Interface & Visual Designer
Art Direction, Research, Interaction, Visual design, Pitching
Overview
The marketing team at Google Pay visioned to device a campaign using the gamification model of collectables to bump up the user acquisition and retention.
The goal of this campaign was to increase engagement and awareness of the app. This campaign was the first-ever marketing campaign to promote the app in Google Pay India.
Background
Google Pay has been at the forefront in the digital payment space using UPI technology in India. The app enables users to make payments seamlessly. The app’s key features are making peer to peer payments, peer to merchant payments, buy gold, and on those transactions, the user gets rewarded scratchcards and various offers.
We wanted to design a simple game to understand, easy to understand and resonates with all users across the country.
Challenge
India is a big country and has many versions of how Diwali gets celebrated. We needed to come up with five different stamps that resonate with all users across India. Our challenge was to evolve with the users and launch a festive campaign in the highly competitive digital space during a busy festive time in a short turnaround time.
Solution
In favour of speed to market, we were tasked to research, design and build the campaign within the offers channel architecture. The assumption was simple- millions of customers visit the offers channel every day and would be a fitted entry point to the microapp. This early architectural decision had a significant impact on future marketing campaigns.
Process
Due to the short turnaround time, we conducted quick research to define the five collectable stamps. We landed at the most commonly used symbols that represent the festival across the country.
🪔 Diya: Earthen lamps are painted and decorated during the four days of Diwali; they are lit across parapets and doorways.
🪅 Lantern: Most households in India suspend a lantern outside their windows or in their house.
💎 Jhumkha: Being one of the biggest celebrated festival in India, most people in India buy new clothes and accessories to wear during the festival.
🌹Flower: Houses are adorned with flowers on the entrance and used in pujas performed during this time of the year.
🏵 Rangoli: Freehand designs made with Kolam, coloured powder or flowers are exhibited at houses, buildings, and offices entrances.
Over the next two weeks, I was responsible for designing the user interface and defining the campaign’s visual direction. It consisted of developing assets (over 200 assets!!) and presenting the campaign’s art direction to the leadership team alongside the senior UX designer on the project. We defined the timelines and next steps with the engineering team to manage better workflow and meet the tight deadline. Once we had the visual direction locked in, I worked with the marketing team to develop a plan on notifications, emailers, social media posts. Meanwhile, I continued working on pixel perfecting the stamps and making them consistent across the set.
Impact
The campaign was launched successfully and was initially planned for seven days and extended to three more days due to the overwhelming response. The campaign engaged over 40 million users in India, and my designs were well appreciated by consumers and leadership. This campaign was my first big splash in the team. I was delighted to receive great feedback and appreciation from the group and see so many memes and my designs made into cupcakes by a local bakery in Bangalore and all across the internet.
Learning and takeaways
This project took nearly two months to ideate, design, test and implement. It took us to work at the speed of light, innumerable iterations, several hours of user testing and copious amounts of coffee :) This project was a huge learning experience for the entire team and me. Many other digital payment competitors later replicated the structure of this collectable campaign in the market.
