Examples of great marketing strategies: GoJek

Marketing require experienced marketing people willing to think outside the box. Today i would like to share with you a great example of a marketing strategy that helped an Indonesian startup become a unicorn within few years.

Gojek rented a football stadium and gave away phones with SIM cards to 60 000 drivers, because drivers did not have apps on their mobile devices. Thus almost instantly adding 10 000 to 50 000 drivers to their service. They did something else to get the other side of the marketplace, they did proper branding and marketing.

I’ll quote Crystal Widjaja from Gojek:

There were lots of restaurants scattered across Indonesia. So the value prop and the market made sense and the channel by which you would do it through this mobile app made a little bit less sense at the time because most drivers didn’t have a mobile app, but I felt like it was a problem that was very solvable. And we ended up renting a stadium to just hire 60,000 drivers in a couple of weeks.

Yeah, so we did crazy things. If someone told you, in the US, that they were going to rent out a stadium, pre-load a bunch of mobile devices, market that drivers should come here in mass for a job fair. They’re going to give them a phone and send them on their way.