Gangofgirls.com:  Hundred thousand Indian girls join In 4 Weeks

By DJ Varma and Ashwin Sinha

The latest entrant aboard the website bandwagon, sunsilkgangofgirls.com, has scripted a very interesting success story in the Indian web industry. Bankrolled by consumer giant Hindustan Level and designed by BC Web Wise, this woman’s online advertising boutique has struck an instant chord with the young, cash-rich Indian women. Over a hundred thousand of them signed up on the website in the last one month.

Chaya Brian Carvalho, CEO & MD, BC Web Wise, is the founder of gangoggirls.com headquartered in Mumbai. Chaya has always been a woman who has done things differently. After finishing graduation in science, she went on to explore the world of journalism. Climbing up to the position of Assistant Editor with Business Today after 10 years of writing about the advertising, marketing and media industry and the consumer product sector, Chaya realized she wanted to strike out on her own in the media business. 

Filled with grit and gumption, she gave it all up to start her own portal tips4me.com in March 2000. Tips4me.com is a community portal with 18 channels of interest, ranging from beauty to dating, and homecare to car care. The company’s understanding of internet communities and building of consumer loyalty for tips4me channels led to corporates showing interest in building communities for their brands. Chaya forayed into the field of creating online communication strategies for various brands and corporations. She launched BC Web Wise which claims to be India’s top agency in online communication across all sectors.

Techgoss spoke to Chaya about their latest success story – gangofgirls.com. Chaya was understandably coy about sales figures and other commercial information.

Q. How did your team come up with the idea of gangofgirls.com targeted at Indian women?

A (Chaya Brian Carvalho) -  Sunsilknaturals.com which was the predecessor of the gangofgirls.com initiative was a huge success. Before gangofgirls was launched, Sunsilk already had over 95,000 girls online. They were surfing not just hair care content but using the message board to discuss topics like ‘Shahrukh Khan’, the movie ‘Zeher’, and the like. When we started the brand website for Sunsilk, it was launched as a community initiative because we had the learning and experience of making it work. Our own portal http://www.tips4me.com/ gave us these insights.
 
So, coupled with the success of sunsilknaturals over a three-year period, the brand team, including their mainstream agency, was fired up about doing something bigger in the online space which led to the gangofgirls initiative.

Q. How much brainstorming was involved in getting the website up and running?

A. The development for the site started around November 2005 and we geared up for a formal launch on June 15th 2006! There was a beta site that was launched initially to gauge interest of girls and women to such a concept and the feedback was simply fabulous.

Q.  If sunsilknaturals was so much of a success, why did you need to create gangofgirls?
 
A. That was sunsilknaturals.com. You could say sunsilkgangofgirls.com was an
answer to the growing popularity of sunsilknaturals.com, and the fact that the brand could deliver a lot more to the user online. It is also about enhancing the offering, sustaining and growing the interest of the user base.
 
Q.  What age group are you targeting at?
 
A. 18 to 25—pretty much the entire band with spillovers on both ends.

Q. How big is Hindustan Lever? What products of its do the girls use ?
 
A. The turnover figures are available on http://www.hll.com/ Hind Lever is India’s largest FMCG marketer. There are loads of products for girls—soaps, creams, deodorants, and other cosmetics.

Q. How did you work out the advertising strategy to reach out to young girls?

A. This would be better answered by Hindustan Lever’ brand manager. From our end, we had terrific tools which gave tangible benefits. These were communicated in all the ads.

Q. How do you ensure the secrecy and security of young girls on your site?

A. We have put in various systems in place to prevent online sharing of phone numbers and email ids. There are also other filters. There is also a strict privacy policy wherein information shared by girls while registering is protected.

All the forums on the message board have human moderators.

Q. Have boys, being boys, tried to get membership by signing on as girls?

A. The site is not 100% boy-proof. However when a first time user clicks on
 ‘male’ option, he gets categorized in a gang called the ‘Desperate Guys’.

Q. What would you term as a milestone in the journey of this website?
 
A. The sunsilkgangofgirls.com has 1,16,964 registered members in five weeks (as of July 26th) and 11,511 gangs. The numbers keep increasing everyday

Sunsilk's ‘gangofgirls’ is India's first all-girl online community, designed to make every girl feel special. Tools such as Makeover Machine are extremely popular on the site.
Over 40 entries come in every day on Parade Ground alone where girls can showcase their talents.

Q. What have been the challenges on the way?

A. A big challenge is moderating the very high number of content posted by visitors. Filters have to put in every day.

The bigger challenge is taking the various feedbacks from users, scanning them, and incorporating elements to improve the site, both strategically and content-wise.

Q. Websites all the time fine-tune by adding and dropping elements. What have you done to keep pace with constant changes?  Was there anything that put off your audience?

A. We had a style maker that displayed various hairstyles that the girl could choose on sunsilknaturals.com. However, with the feedback we received the complete Makeover Machine was developed for sunsilkgangofgirls.com that now includes various styles of application & shades in eye make-up, lipstick, eye-shadow, colored lenses, hair styles, and hair color.
 
Q. Every website is a marketing exercise (including techgoss.com). Does gangofgirls aim primarily at marketing hair products by understanding your consumers better?
 
A. This would be better answered by HLL.
 
Q. Has hair product sales increased in the last month?
 
A. Again, HLL would be the right source and authority to answer this.
 
Q.  Apart from gangofgirls, is there any other website where young girls in India can log on to and meet online? Who are your rivals?
 
A. None that we know of. It is not an easy platform to create and sustain.