Analyzing Tokopedia’s Advertising Strategy

It’s a common thing to see Tokopedia logo everywhere nowadays. On TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, you name it. It’s almost impossible not to hear its slogan, “Ciptakan Peluangmu” and “Sudah Cek Tokopedia belum?”, lingering in our daily life.

It’s interesting to compare Tokopedia’s ads with the ads from other big hitters like Traveloka, Tiket, OLX, Bukalapak, Zalora, and Lazada. Everyone of those, including Tokopedia, applies performance-based advertising. Almost all of those companies opt to promote certain discounts or price subsidy to offer competitive price for consumers.

Tokopedia is different from its competitors who make sure that every cent they spend, they spend it well. It kinda reminding people that chance will not come twice in their life, that it must be created. In this case, the chance is to do online trading. Tokopedia wants to amplify that it has the capacity of facilitating whoever wants to reach national scale of audience.

Its decision of appointing Chelsea Islan as the brand ambassador is also considerably unique. It shows that while targeting online buyers, it specifically targets those young energetic women who currently dominate the market.

The way I see it, it’s a fresh alternative approach, as it approaches users emotionally, not only focusing on the ads performance and so-called ROI. However, it’s not risk-free. This strategy requires much more massive exposure, and different ROI calculation, not to mention that it’s never your short-term project. While it only takes days for advertisers to evaluate the performance of performance-based ads, it needs months and even years to do so with emotional ads, like one that Tokopedia promotes.

Time and money, of course, aren’t even an issue for Tokopedia, at least for now. This is a privilege which actually is possessed by almost all of its competitors as well.

It’s interesting to see how this ads model may benefit Tokopedia in the future, finding out whether Tokopedia can win the heart and mind of users in the coming years. Well, platforms like Tokopedia, OLX, and Bukalapak indeed normally can’t be the only one users look for. Many users even use all of those media to facilitate their daily business operations.

Translated by Rifki Aria Nugraha