A Case Study of India’s Former Favourite Chatting App, Hike.
When Hike was all the new rage, I was in high school and the app was on my mother’s phone. While coming back on the school bus, me and my friends used to challenge each other to “nudge wars” and “sticker wars”. We were always not only connected but in each other’s faces, and we loved it. Hike was so cool, my memory fails when I try to think of why we moved on from it. I do not remember Hike as anything but amazing. I was apprehensive before I started reading up on Hike’s story, wondering what it might do to the memories I had. Would the flood of rational information ruffle the feathers of sweet remembrance? But I persevered, it was a bittersweet experience reliving those days, but now from the perspective of Hike. Well then, let us begin, let us try to understand the story of Hike, the dreams and ideas that created it and its final dissolution.
The Early Days: Navigating a Slow Internet
- Hike was launched in 2012, and at that time digital literacy in India was considerably lower because data was very expensive and the familiarity that more people have today with the internet was absent. The internet was a complicated space to be navigated.
- It was the zamana of 2g. Meaning, the internet was slow and easily exhaustible.
The Super-App Strategy
From 2014 onward Hike offered unlimited free SMS, meaning you could send messages even while you were offline)
- Hike also tried to become a super-app, a sort of gateway to a large part of the internet. Kavin Bharti Mittal, the founder of Hike, mentions in an interview that the hypothesis that they were working with was that, since navigating the internet was so difficult, Hike, by becoming that one place where you could do a lot of things at once (on Hike you could see the news, play games, send money and new features were added every year) would simplify the process of navigation.
The Peak: India’s Youngest Unicorn
- This worked very well for Hike in the beginning, the limited number of people who were using the internet, actually favoured Hike over other messaging platforms. (The reasons we shall discuss further on in the next sections)
- Hike became India’s youngest startup to acquire the Unicorn status (i.e crossed $1.4 billion valuation) on August 16, 2016.
The Turning Point: 4G Changes Everything
- Hike’s market started to tilt downwards when 4g was introduced and overall data became cheaper.
- It became possible for consumers to have a separate app for every function, without them slowing their device down.
- Hike appeared more and more complicated in comparison to specialised apps which focused on performing one task. (separate apps for news, games, texting and so on)
The Pivot and the End
- Therefore, Hike let go of the superapp approach in 2019 and focused on creating separate apps for separate purposes.
- However, in 2021, they had to terminate their messaging wing, that is Hike Sticker Chat. The reason was that Hike was a very text heavy app, media could not be as actively shared through Hike as they could be with WhatsApp. People’s expectations of messaging changed, and Hike could not keep up.
Enough About Failures, Let’s Talk About the Craze
Even Rome falls right? But that is not all that we must talk about, let’s try and understand what made Hike so popular that it has been eternally etched in our memories. We cannot think of 2016 without imagining coming back from school and grabbing the phone to send a few or a hundred “nudges” to our gang. Remember the tagline of Hike? “Got a gang…get on Hike!”. Let’s talk about Hike’s genius strategy that made it such a formidable app that left their competitors eating dust
Hike’s Hyperlocal Strategy
Language
As we discussed earlier, Hike wanted the internet to be a less complicated and more accessible space, the company wanted to bring as many people online as possible and they rightly decided that the best way to do that would be by allowing people to communicate in their own respective languages. Hike messenger was born and bred in India, the people working with Hike understood how important a step it would be if people could send each other messages in their own language. In 2015, Hike rolled out improved user interface, predictive texts and stickers in 8 Indian languages namely, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu. In a statement Kavin Bharti Mittal said, “Every single hiker will now be able to choose a local language and will see a special keyboard that they can use built specifically for that language.”
Focusing on Small Cities
The digital divide between larger cities and smaller ones were starker during Hike’s time. Hike’s decisions like unlimited free SMS, the opportunity to not only chat but generate stickers in regional languages, encouraged people from smaller cities to join the internet. This increased Hike’s market while also making more people feel included in the digital space.
Stickers
Hike’s major selling point was its vast collection of stickers. In 2017 they announced that personalised stickers were created for 500+ colleges across India. This was a part of their hyperlocal strategy wherein they tried to connect students within the campus of colleges. Not only stickers but large media like movies and images could be shared quickly from one phone to another provided they were in the same campus.
The Stickers were a place where a person from India, for the first time felt themselves adequately represented. There were packets and packets of stickers that were local in their aesthetics. Languages, skin tones, garments, popular expressions, everything found a place in the stickers. With the introduction of Hike Moji, they outdid themselves. Hike Moji was a digital avatar powered by AI and Natural Language Processing. The Avatar was generated by taking a selfie. Then the app would look into its huge database of customisable options of hairstyles, facial expressions, jewellery, local clothing styles and so forth, to create an accurate avatar for you.
Hike’s Advertising Strategy
The first set of Hike’s advertisements were done by the agency Taproot India. The agency made 4 ad films to kickstart Hike’s campaign in December, 2012. Both their conceptualisations and taglines were fresh. The tagline of this particular campaign was “keep close friends close”. One may imagine the client-agency meeting between Hike and Taproot.
Hike: Here’s what we want, young, cool, laid back, a lot of wit and a lot of desiness.
Taproot: We know exactly what you mean, we are going to add a spoonful of hot in there too.
Seriously, I suggest you go on youtube and watch all the advertisements of Hike, they are going to take you back to what college life looked like back in 2013. Hike knew its target audience very personally, the way they talked, their aspirations, desires and struggles. The narratives revolved around relationship drama, pranks, parties, and repartee. Hike’s advertisements represented friendships and all the chaos that comes with it as exceptionally amusing. Hike told a story : “you have a lot to talk about, insane things are happening around you all the time and you shall have the resources to keep everyone posted on the tea.”
Conclusion
You might not remember Hike advertising itself a whole lot on TV after the initial 2013 campaign. Because the marketing they did in the beginning brought a significant amount of people on board. They did not need to advertise further because messaging apps work differently than other products. If your friends are on Hike, you have to be there too, to communicate. It is self perpetuating, once people start converting, they will inevitably bring other people with them.
As digital marketers what we learn from hike is the importance of being relevant, detail oriented, deeply contextual (the entire world cannot be our consumer, we have to choose a target audience and speak in a very personal way to them), in this era of meta ads, and unlimited usage of AI in every field, it is commonplace to lose track of who you are selling to. Remember you are always selling to people, humans not bots. Understand them, and then make a product that addresses their concerns and proudly advertise it!