When in India, do as the Indians do: Xiaomi’s leap into Diwali sales

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Xiaomi seems to have taken this old adage to heart in its efforts towards “incorporating Xiaomi into the fabric of India,” as Xiaomi VP Hugo Barra put it while announcing the Chinese phonemaker’s first made-in-India phone in August.

Today the company is lighting up the sky with a “Diwali bumper offer” – a phrase Indian retailers tend to use during the Diwali festival shopping season. There’s even a pop movie in Telugu (a South Indian language) called Bumper Offer. (Caveat: The movie has nothing to do with ecommerce and was remade in Bengali with the more accurate title Loveria as it was just another love story.)

Light Mi Up

Aside from the bumper offer, Xiaomi’s Diwali has a few cool touches more characteristic of the social media-savvy company from Beijing that has caught the imagination of technophiles in India. There’s the Light Mi Up game which asks “Mi fans” to create a unique pattern of diyas (lamps traditionally arranged in patterns and lit up on Diwali nights). They can also win prizes by retracing a Mi India diya pattern in 10 seconds.

There’s the usual Xiaomi tactic to drum up excitement with flash sales of Mi gadgets which disappear in seconds and leave a trail of disgruntled shoppers on social media. But it also has straight offers, such as a 25 percent discount on the Mi Pad. The “bumper prize” though is a Mi TV 2S given away to a lucky winner on each of the three days of the #DiwaliWithMi, which concludes tomorrow.

See: India’s ecommerce giants set fire to TV with Diwali ads

Xiaomi’s second home

Xiaomi has made a number of moves since arriving in India last year to make this large market its “second home” as Lei Jun, the founder and CEO, calls it.

Xiaomi phones were only available on ecommerce site Flipkart at first, but it soon opened up new sales channels on other sites and its own Mi India site as well as The Mobile Stores’ brick-and-mortar outlets. Then the Mi 4i had a global premiere in India, which was made memorable by founders Lei Jun and Lin Bin taking a ride in an auto-rickshaw (the Indian tuk-tuk).

Here are our picks from #DiwaliWithMi