Cab Drivers as Word-of-Mouth Marketers?

Imagine the cabbies playing the dual role of a ‘driver’ and a ‘product-marketer’. Recently, I had read in a blog-post that the company that sells ads on the outside of cars in London would now secretly pay money to the car drivers for product marketing. 

Questions are already being raised about ethics, integrity, merit and even possible spam. Rather than criticizing the move, lets try to look at it from an Indian perspective and see if we can draw some merits out of this.

• In Delhi the move could be implemented in the ‘Autos’ and ‘DTC Buses’.
• The drivers would act as ‘customer evangelists’ by sharing their experience of products they’ve used. This could be absolutely anything under the sun as long as the driver has used it or is planning to use it. It could range from a tooth-brush to television.
• Several advertisements of different portals like ‘oktatabyebye.com’, ‘mapmyindia.com‘ can be seen on Delhi’s Autos.
• I think it would make some sense if the drivers can understand the purpose of these websites like mapmyindia, routeguru and even burrp.com by helping the travellers to connect their real needs with these city-centric portals.

Coming back to the news story, at this stage all one can say is that it looks interesting. Perhaps the companies should portray drivers as ‘Customer Evangelists’ instead of Spammers 😉

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