Zomato might now be a $20 billion company, but it still seems to believe in doing things that won’t necessarily scale.
Zomato is letting users send a personalized message from celebrities to their mothers on Mothers Day. The personalized message is free on all orders above Rs. 149 on the occasion. The message is AI generated, and is powered by celebrity messaging company TrueFan.
Today, Zomato users will see an option to add a free video message from a celebrity for their Mom with their orders. The celebrities in the list include Vidya Balan, Neena Gupta, Kajal Aggarwal, Sonali Bendre and Rajesh Kumar. Each celebrity has a pre-recorded video message wishing the user’s mother, but users can type in their mothers’ name, and Zomato adds the mother’s name to the beginning of the message using AI.
Once the order is placed, Zomato likely generates the personalized video with the mother’s name using AI, and makes it available for download in 15 minutes. Users can download the video and share them with their mothers along with their Zomato order.
It’s a pretty clever idea — creating AI generated videos is quite cheap these days, and Zomato can well afford to give away these personalized messages for free. Also, there are only so many unique Indian women names, and Zomato can likely use each generated message hundreds of times for people with the same name. And the idea — while gimmicky — is an interesting add-on for a Mothers Day gift.
It isn’t as though this personalized Mothers Day wish alone will make much of a difference to Zomato’s bottom line — the messages are free, and Zomato could possibly lose money from the entire initiative — but idea like these help Zomato stand out in what is now essentially a duopoly with Swiggy. With restaurant listings, prices and delivery times across the two services now largely identical, ideas like these can help Zomato stand out, and build user loyalty. There are other instances when Zomato has thought out of the box — as growth in its food delivery volumes were stagnating, it decided to introduce a service named Intercity Legends, which allowed customers to order food from other cities. Zomato discovered that it didn’t have real-time weather data to be able to decide surge prices and delivery commitments during rains, so it’s gone ahead and installed 650 weather stations in Indian cities. Zomato is now more than 15 years old, but the company appears to be still innovating — and executing — like new eager-eyed startup.