Why all brands say it with stickers

“Our research tells us that Gen Z, our main target audience, loves communicating via stickers because it allows them to express themselves without having to say much,” he said. “We offer sticker packs to users in giveaway contests. Stickers then become an enticement to get them to do something, like explore our new product,” he added.

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Stickers are static or animated cartoon images similar to GIFs, but in smaller file sizes, so they take up very little space on your phone’s memory and are stored in the sticker library in the Messages app, making it easier to look for them during a conversation. Unlike GIFs, which are mostly rectangular, stickers are available in different shapes.

Over the past year and a half, stickers have emerged as an important marketing tool for advertisers eager to be a part of our daily conversations as more people, especially zoomers, use them to communicate on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Discord, and Telegram .

Brands pay anywhere between ₹10 lakh and ₹50 lakh to specialists who design and market branded stickers to an audience accustomed to chatting with stickers.

“Stickers have become a means of placing brands in conversations in a non-intrusive way,” said Ankit Prasad, founder and CEO of Bobble AI, a conversational media platform whose keyboard application provides personalized stickers to its 22 million active users in real-time. users it claims to have.

“Close to 100 brands, including the likes of ITC and Mondelez and many sponsors of major cricket tournaments, have created sticker packs with us in recent times,” added Prasad.

Brands that want to look younger tend to use stickers for marketing and communication activities, said Harshil Karia, founder of Schbang, a digital agency.

Some of his traditional customers have asked to create sticker packs that salespeople can use in internal chats, he added. “We also created custom stickers for people on Schbang to interact with each other.”

“Brands like Zomato are also using stickers instead of emojis now while creating advertising campaigns with a screenshot of a fake chat,” said Suyash Agarwal, a 22-year-old from Kolkata who works as an assistant creative producer at a content firm. Agarwal is famous. in their social circle for their sticker library and struggle to have conversations on platforms where you can’t use stickers.

Sticker.ly, a top sticker creation and discovery app from Korea’s Snow Inc., counts India among its top three markets, according to Sensor Tower data. Sticker-making apps that capture pop culture nuances in Indian languages ​​like Hindi, Tamil and Telugu also have a few million installs on the Google Play Store. While Sticker.ly has over 100 million downloads, it lists more than a million user reviews for its Android app. “Apps like these don’t get many reviews, but in this case the app maker asks you to watch an ad or leave a review to unlock more sticker packs,” said Chinmay Dhumal, a 22-year-old technology writer and vlogger.

“Otherwise, the Gen Z audience believes in doing the bare minimum to get things done and won’t put in the effort to write a review for an app,” he added.

Popular with teenagers, stickers are also gaining favor with older demographics.

“We wanted to use stickers while giving investors updates about WhatsApp. It piqued their interest and now they are telling us that stickers are widely used by their family members as well,” said FamPay’s Thaker.

However, Karia said that discovering a branded pack of stickers is still challenging as “most people are still experimenting”.

Furthermore, stickers only work for specific brands and in specific contexts where they’re trying to connect with audiences by being funny, entertaining, self-deprecating or sticking to a pop culture element, said Shagun Ohri, who runs a creative branding firm. in Bengaluru called The Satori Studio. “Brands need to be careful with their sticker campaigns, especially when targeting Gen Z, because they don’t want to see logos in their WhatsApp chats,” she added. “The only place Gen Z likes logos is on their sneakers.”