When a competitor infringes your trademark how do you respond? In the case of an Indian online market for stays it was to use humour. Yogendra Vasupal, the company’s founder tells us how

On the morning of March 20, 2015, a Stayzilla customer sent an email to the team. They had seen the advert (snapshot below) of OYO Rooms, a competitor, which was using our name in vain. This was a clear case of trademark infringement. Today, Stayzilla is leading the online marketplace for stays in India and we couldn’t just sit by and watch a competitor take the fruit out of our bowl.

While contemplating consequent legal action, it was important to keep traffic coming in.

After all, OYO Rooms is a fellow startup and the team did not want to get into the arduos legal wrangle over an issue like this.

What ensued was an internal WhatsApp discussion which led to the idea of using  social media avenue to react. In India, social media is playing a huge role in driving preferences and opinions. As an online player, we understand the responsibility of being honest yet effective in communications. We also understand that social media is an immensely powerful tool, which has the capacity to make or break brands. We believe it helps to drive mass opinion and gives a consolidated view of what the competitor is doing.

Typically, companies resort to legal battles for trademark and IP protection, but social media has proven to be an influential tool to raise awareness and establish public opinion about the involved company’s brand image. It’s interesting too how social media conversations can use humour to attract the viewer’s interest.

Of course, there have been instances where social media battles have backfired and this was a risk for Stayzilla's brand, so it needed to be handled in a mature way. Humour works best in crisp Twitter posts, and that was our chosen route. Internally, Stayzilla employees began sending Yo Mama jokes to each other via WhatsApp to express their feeling about the controversy. It was this very exchange that gave birth to the idea of a Twitter banter.

The entire team worked on quirky posts in a bid to make it funny yet compelling. A key decision was not to complain or use bullying tactics.

Being confident of it’s success, it started with appreciation!

The conversation that followed looked something like this.

By the time the Twitter war was on, there were some indirect posts, targeted at the company's value proposition. The OYO Mama jokes were perhaps the best part of the day.

The effective use of WhatsApp, Twitter and crowdsourcing led to a fun activity. On the other side, consistent responses made OYO realise their mistake and accept it, hence bringing the banter to a close.

The objective was to resolve the issue immediately instead of making it a public spectacle, and the team worked within certain limits to ensure the entire conversation never got out of hand. After all, there are certain norms for social media interactions and messages should never be rude or inappropriate.

We believe that this approach helped us achieve a quick outcome and a bonus was the team had fun executing it.

This guest post was written by Yogendra Vasupal is Founder & CEO of Stayzilla.com, which books 4,000 room nights each day. His views are his own.