You must have seen a youtube video for a song named ‘Emptiness’ circling around on facebook and blogs. The song is said to be sung by an IIT Guwahati student named Rohan Rathore. The story goes like this:
Rohan Rathore pursuing engineering studies from a prestigious institute(IIT-G) in India suffered from cancer. He loved a girl deeply. He demonstrated his feelings for the girl, but the girl did not revert back. Apparently she was not interested in Rohan, leaving him heart-broke.
Rohan, in this pain, composed a song called ‘Emptiness’ about his unreturned love for the girl. The soul song(with guitars and drums playing in the background) was for the heart broken lovers.
The story further says that Rohan, who was suffering from cancer, died 15 days after recording this song.
Here is the Youtube link for the song:
YouTube - emptiness official video song by Rohan Rathore iit student of guwahati
It has been revealed by some IIT Guwahati students that the story is completely FALSE !
Yes, this was a inhumanly clever marketing tactic by some people. Let’s see what they did right:
1. They knew the song was good. But an underground track does not reach a wide audience easily. So they associated a story with it.
2. It is the young people(school and college students) who are the target audience. So they made a story to target these people. And these people are also easily susceptible.
3. There are two prominent ways of viral marketing. Either make it a funny thing, or make it a Sad scandalous thing. These people stooped so low that they made a story to play with emotions of youngsters who were naive enough to trust them.
4. They used Three strong keywords- LOVE, IIT-GUWAHATI and CANCER. ‘Love’ was enough to pull romantically influenced people. IIT-Guwahati is a prestigious college in India, so it again became an eye-catcher. ‘Cancer’ disabled the reasoning abilities of the target audience and aroused a feeling of pity in them. Game Over.
5. A bunch of idiots found the recipe for a great viral marketing campaign, but it isn’t quite easy to fool anyone across the internet, especially in the age of internet when you can just ask anyone through a chat.
IIT-Guwahati students say that nobody with that name ever existed with such a story. If this incident was real, it would have been in news all over the country. We would not have found about it through a video.
If the motive of this viral marketing was to promote the song, then the masterminds have already lost it. Nobody will believe that the composer-singer is anyone but ‘Rohan Rathore’.
