The marketing of Anagha.com
JPR:
Hope Sen. Moynihan's daughter finds what she is looking for but I doubt it.<g>
You know when Moynihan was the Ambassador,he once let me borrow couple of books from the the American Library in New Delhi upon my written request,actually he had them mailed to me in Agra where I was a student,nice guy eh?
Now here is an interesting story.
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The marketing of Anagha.com
anagha.com
Praveen Purushotham
NEW DELHI, July 29
IN today's wired economy, anything is possible. Anagha, a top Indian model, has set the trend by marketing herself using the World Wide Web. www.anagha.com is the Web site of the model who's making waves in the ad world with her offbeat approach.
The idea of using a Web site to market one's professional modelling capabilities may be unconventional. But as Anagha has shown, it can be done _ and to good effect too. She has landed a three-year contract with Metropolitan, New York, a big agency on the US east coast.
A Bangalore girl with a degree in economics from Delhi's St. Stephens, Anagha was comfortably settled in a career in banking with HSBC when she met David, an Australian, whom she married.
Acting on a suggestion by a professional photographer, Anagha did a couple of test-shoots for modelling and _ behold _ a versatile, hot model was created.
Fuelled by success in the local industry which included featuring on the Elle (India) cover in April 1999, this quiet, unassuming model wanted to succeed internationally. For this, she had to attract the attention of the international fashion community and modelling agencies.
The problem was, international ad agencies required at least 10 samples of a model's portfolio and in sizes no less than 5''x7''. Making prints would have cost around Rs. 10,000 per portfolio copy. For 2,000 agencies, this works out to Rs. 20 lakhs. Moreover, mailers are really shots in the dark.
That's when David, who is an Internet buff, came up with the idea of setting up a promotional Web site for Anagha. He got together with Mr. Soumya Meattle at Module One, a Web consulting start-up enterprise in Delhi, to deliver a simple yet powerful sales pitch for Anagha's modelling calibre through the Web site.
The site was designed to reach one million hits a month. Today, the site has not only achieved success, but has also reached a peak of one million hits a day. Anagha's site also had a goal to get 25 business queries and 500 general queries a month. The return on Web investment (RoWI) has been in excess of 100 per cent.
The Web site cost just a few lakhs and mailing cost around Rs. 40,000. ''The costs saved by sending out 2,000 Web site postcards instead of full portfolios itself paid for the Web site,'' says David.
As Anagha recalls, ''What I didn't know until I went there is that 'physical presence' really matters. These agencies receive thousands of such mailers which are promptly dumped _ they just can't be bothered to go through all of them. If I had sent my portfolio mailer, it would have met with the same fate,'' she says with a wry smile.
Instead, Anagha took screen shots of her home page, created postcards of that, and mailed them out to the modelling agencies asking them to take a look at her Web site.
Unusual tactics? Yes, but in an industry filled with millions of beautiful women, being an oddball is often the only way to get noticed. And it worked.
The Web site, which is essentially a celebration of Anagha the model, has received international acclaim including USA Today picking it as the 'Site of the month'.
Many models have written to Anagha asking if they could be part of the site too, says David. Interestingly, the site did not receive much malicious or hate mail. Anagha doesn't tire recounting the number of times people have written to seek her advice on entering the modelling industry.
An old man once wrote a letter asking for tips to help his grand-daughter become a model. ''It was as if he was apologetic for having visited a model's Web site (at his age) but, really, this was a sincere man, with no rancour in his heart, who really appreciated the site for what it was,'' Anagha says.
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