GoDaddy India – The Fastest Growing Company 2019
Category Chosen: Internet
Specialisation Category: Domains and Cloud Platform
GoDaddy powers the world’s largest cloud platform and domain name registrar. With nearly 19 million customers worldwide, GoDaddy is the place people come to name their idea, build a professional website, attract customers and manage their work.
GoDaddy offers an integrated suite of products for small business owners and entrepreneurs, ranging from domain names, hosting, website building, to email marketing, security protections and an online store. GoDaddy offers 24/7 customer support, locally and in regional languages, to help guide customers in the growth of their venture, and to find the tools that best meet their needs.
Company Vision:
Our vision is to empower entrepreneurs everywhere, by providing all the help and tools to succeed online.
Company Mission:
Our mission is to give our customers the tools, insights and the people to transform their ideas and personal initiative into success.
Ethos of the brand:
Empowering everyday entrepreneurs around the world.
Total Number of Employees in the Company:
More than 9000 employees across markets. In India, GoDaddy has around 1100 employees.
Countries the brand is present:
Over 50 markets around the world.
What would you define as the unique value proposition of the product: the functional, emotional and differentiating product benefits that have contributed to providing an enduring brand experience to customers?
There are companies in India that offer pieces of what GoDaddy delivers, but what makes us unique is that we offer an integrated suite of products for small business owners and entrepreneurs, ranging from domain names, hosting, website building, to email marketing, security protections and an online store. Our award-winning, 24×7 customer care is a major differentiator for GoDaddy. In India, GoDaddy Customer Support is free of charge and offers support in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu, besides in English, to help guide customers in the growth of their venture, and help find the tools that best meet their needs.
What are the physical, character and personality attributes of the brand that have evoked and inspired consumers’ self-expression and personal identity?
Everything we do at GoDaddy is centred on our customers. We are always striving to create a WOW experience for our customers through a sharp focus on their business journey and success results. We pride ourselves on offering complete online tools and solutions, backed by an award-winning 24*7 expert team of customer care agents including to help our customers along the way, as they go from setting up their business to finally growing it online. This instils a sense of trust among customers and reassures them that GoDaddy is committed to being a trusted partner for its customers, helping them at each step of their online business journey.
Please provide an insight into the brand marketing strategies that have effectively penetrated consumers’ psyche, established a meaningful relationship with the target audiences and ensured positive brand perception.
In India, we strategically focus on building awareness on the benefits of creating an online presence through our national marketing campaigns offered in 7 Indian languages, including the latest “Bijness Bhai” campaign, with Indian cricket star, MS Dhoni.
Since, majority of small business owners and entrepreneurs in India rely on technical experts (i.e. web professionals) to create and manage their business websites, GoDaddy is invested in helping the web professionals in the country, with right online tools, programs, and partnership options to help their clients.
Finally, we are a customer-centric company and are committed to continue listening to our customers, provide relevant and flexible product offerings and the right 24 x7 customer care to help them grow and thrive online.
How has the brand extended its presence to the frontiers of internet advertising and social networking? What is the level of significance the brand accords to utilizing social media as a competitive edge?
We use a range of media and advertising channels to execute our marketing campaigns, including print, radio, social and other digital platforms. However, we firmly believe in and support the power of digital, opening new avenues for business growth. Keeping in mind the expansive range and power of social media to drive engaging and relevant conversations, we are pretty active on various social and online platforms, encouraging people to turn their dreams and ideas into reality online.
Please outline few key marketing endeavors in the past decade that you feel have been landmark initiatives in reinforcing the legacy of the brands’ promise to influence consumer intent and enhanced the brands’ propensity to drive affirmative consumer action.
Last year, we signed in MS Dhoni as India brand ambassador, featuring in our latest marketing campaign as Bijness Bhai, to create awareness among small businesses in Tier 2, Tier 3 cities, about the benefits of having an online presence. The campaign was quite well receive and became one of the 10 most influential, creative and promising ad campaigns in India in 2018.
This year, we have partnered with the ICC to sponsor the Men’s Cricket World Cup 2019, being held in the United Kingdom, aimed at further raising GoDaddy brand awareness and increase consumer love across Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities in the country.
How has the brand derived strength from innovation as a sustainable differentiating strategy adding to long-term brand equity? Please provide few instances of measures implemented towards this goal.
Technology today, is powering the next stage of growth across business areas and digital has fast emerged as the medium of this movement. As digital penetration is booming in the country, the second wave of internet adoption is coming from Tier II & Tier III cities. At GoDaddy, we are tirelessly working to help bring emerged India (Tier 1) and emerging India (Tier II and Tier III cities) online, by giving them the right tools, insights and the people, in their regional languages, to help transform their ideas and personal initiative into success. As a result of our market localization strategy, over the last seven years, GoDaddy India has witnessed significant uptick in all its product categories, which has helped us reach over one million customers in India.
What is the key leadership value that drives the brand.
Our values make us strong. They are witnessed every day in our company’s culture and are a declaration of who we are. Our values are the North Start for every member of the GoDaddy team and power our success. They help each of us be our best selves and are paramount to how we attract, hire, promote and reward the best employees. GoDaddy core values include:
Extraordinary customer focus on the experience and achievement of our customers.
Own outcomes working toward the best possible outcome for our customers.
Join forces because together we celebrate our success and learn from our failures.
Work fearlessly to innovate and take risks to achieve uncommon outcomes.
Live passionately with a healthy life fuelled by fun and passion for a better world.
What type of employee satisfaction programs are conducted by your brand?
GoDaddy, as a workplace, is a natural fit for anyone who is self-driven at work. We constantly work to maintain a collaborative, co-creative office culture, built on teamwork, collective effort and mutual understanding. Amidst all this, we also find time to unwind and make work more fun. Be it indoor facilities like gyms or game rooms, cross-team events, or even opportunities to participate in our community or CSR focused events, we ensure that the teams are able to de-stress and zone out in the most fun ways possible.
How much does your brand emphasis on employee training & development, kindly elaborate.
We believe when imaginations run wild you can achieve amazing accomplishments. We work to make it happen. Our diverse employee population reflects the customers we service. Since we feel our success is driven by the passion and potential of our talent, we work hard at enabling them, training them and supporting them, while at the same time, letting them be, so they can do their best work.
We encourage our talent to strive for excellence in technical skill set, while maintaining the attitude of supporting and empathizing with our customers, to help them along the way.
What are your brand’s most effective intangible motivational tools for employees?
To constantly keep our teams motivated and passionate towards the incredible work they do every day, we encourage employees to make sure they’re living a rich, healthy, involved life away from work. We’ve had many initiatives where the team has worked together for social causes, taken up fitness goals and run marathons, all in an endeavour to help them broaden their horizons and stay committed to achieving the goal together.
We’re also big on celebrating successes, so we ensure that all the hard work and impact created by our people is recognized and rewarded.
Kindly elaborate on your existing & potential CSR activities.
We enrolled ourselves to join the Indian government’s Self4society platform, an open digital space for all tech companies in India to share stories of how they are bringing social change in the country. In November 2018, GoDaddy India made it to the leader board of Self4Society portal, as one of the top 5 companies for their meaningful contribution under this initiative, through following activities:
Conducting a school renovation drive, by cleaning a government school for kids of low-income groups, painting the walls and drawing inspiring messages on them.
Supporting education drive, by distributing pencil boxes and notebooks among students in another government school.
Promoting arts & culture Drive, in which GoDaddy team participated in a painting competition with government school kids, spending quality time with them, distributing prizes to the winners, and finally donating a printer to the school.
Which area of social responsibility is more significant for your brand?
Going digital is always a form of empowerment, be it for an individual or a business. GoDaddy takes pride in the fact that we are the agents of delivering this power to over one million people in India.
As part of our market growth strategy, while going deeper into the country, beyond the metros and bigger cities, we realized that there is a rising hunger amongst students and women entrepreneurs to learn, adapt, and succeed independently. Soon, grassroots learning and community engagement for this section of the society became a key theme for all activities under our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) function in the country.