Prepare to be surprised!
In the nook of the country where I grew up, the epitome of a government office was the Accountant General’s office. Known for being the first building to have a lift in our town, it was more famous for employees never being on their seats. No, it was not MBWA (look it up, or read about it here – https://strategypartner.co.in/have-mba-need-mbwa/). The reason was much more prosaic. After having come in fashionably late, many employees would drape their coats (customary hill station office wear) on the back of their chair and pop off to the nearby market for a chai and many cigarettes. After popping back in for some desultory work, they would then break for lunch. You know how this goes, right?
They say childhood experiences have a strong imprint on our minds. In line with this, my impression of how a government office functions has been, I am sad to say, very negative. So imagine my joy when I saw an example of innovative thinking, and even more wonderful – very smart marketing, all the way up in Spiti Valley.
Situated at about an hour’s drive from Kaza, the headquarter town of Spiti district, Hikkim is a small (population approximately 200), nondescript village like most others scattered around the Spiti valley. Just a few kilometres down the road is another village called Lanza, which is famous for a giant statue of the Buddha that is estimated to be a thousand years old. With a famous neighbour like that, and without no equivalent monument to attract visitors, Hikkim was destined to remain the child that everyone ignored while heaping praise on the talented sibling.
Hikkim did have one unique property though. It had the world’s highest post office, which has been functional since 1983. For a long time, that remained simply an interesting fact known to a few people. Till some smart folks from the village and the local administration decided to take it to the next level in order to make Hikkim a tourist attraction and, in the process, increase the income of the local people. The local government, led by the then Additional District Magistrate Gian Sagar Negi, started capitalising on this opportunity by setting up an attractive signboard that became a photo/selfie point. (Bragging rights – Gian is a classmate of mine from the last century, and he is also the person responsible for starting ice hockey and the snow festival in Kaza.)
This was a good start, but could more be done? Was there an opportunity for monetisation, because that is what would really give some much-needed additional income to the local people? The team arrived at a fantastic idea. How cool would it be if one could post a letter or post card to their friends and relatives from the world’s highest post office!
To enable this, they started printing attractive post cards of Hikkim and selling them from a couple of shops that were set up right next to the photo point. The shops conveniently offered pens to encourage visitors to write the messages at the spot, and in the spirit of smoothening the customer journey, one could even buy the postage stamps right there instead of going down to the post office. So visitors could sip their chai and have snacks at these shops while filling out these postcards. All they had to do after this was to drop off the cards in the post office down in the village, which was a few hundred metres away from the highway.
Bright minds in the postal department obviously kept on thinking about how to improve this even further. The result was the opening of a branch of the post office in 2022 that was, in an inspired design choice, shaped like a letter box. This new post office was situated right next to the highway, so visitors now did not have to take a detour into the village to simply post the cards.
Hikkim and this post office have now become a must-visit point for visitors to the area, in the process contributing to the increasing prosperity of the people of Hikkim. When I saw this, I was amazed not just at the level of marketing thinking that went into this project, but also by the fact that it was people from the government and the much maligned postal department who actually did something like this. It just goes to show what is possible if the right people are in place, even in a conventionally bureaucratic setup.
I look forward to your views, and would be especially grateful if you could share other examples of great marketing work done in the most unexpected of places.
You can post your comments here, or on Linkedin, or write to me at jishnu@strategypartner.co.in
References:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180606-the-worlds-highest-post-office
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikkim
Photographs ©Jishnu Changkakoti. 2023. All rights reserved.