Interview with Prasad, BenQ Zowie’s Esports Marketing Specialist

Prasad Paramjothi is BenQ Zowie’s Esports Marketing Specialist. We interviewed him at DreamHack Mumbai 2018 – he shared his vision for BenQ Zowie, and their commitment of being one of the best eSports brands globally!

Satyam: How has been your experience in DreamHack Mumbai 2018?

Prasad: It’s been good! I’ve been in Mumbai since the 18th, so I have been doing a lot of exploring & eating good food. The event so far, everyone knows there have been a few delays in matches and things like that, but overall I think the event’s been organized really well.

S: How do you feel about BenQ Zowie’s presence in eSports globally?

P: Zowie is an eSports brand, it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. I’m glad to see that people in India as well understand that. The people in the BYOC section, if you look for the serious gamers all the monitors that they’ve been using are ZOWIE Monitors.

If they’re a casual gamer maybe they won’t be, but if they’re a serious gamer or playing professionally and want to compete everyone’s using ZOWIE. So, it’s a premium eSports brand.

S: And how about India? How is Zowie’s presence here, and how do they plan to bring it closer to how it is in other countries?

P: India has very price conscious market – people are always concerned about getting the best deal, but we still manage to position ourselves as a premium eSports brand in India as well.

I think the main difference between Zowie here and Zowie, say in America, is that we reach out to the gamers more. We’re all gamers ourselves or former professionals and used to compete at a high level. I think over here what they have not done that much is that they haven’t gone out and made friends with the gamers on a daily basis. They need to know what is going on, what gamers are asking for – whether it’s about the tournaments, the mice, or any questions they want answers of.

I see a lot of people in groups like Facebook groups like CSGO India always talking about the price of this, what’s good, asking for recommendations. But not many people know enough about ZOWIE Products – maybe they use it, but they don’t feel confident enough and don’t have enough knowledge about the product to share with other people.

So I think ZOWIE India needs to do this more – they need to go out and make friends with these gamers, give them the backstory, and share the vision. The most important thing we do in all the other countries is share the spirit of ZOWIE.

Gamers always know what they want to use, but we want to share the spirit of ZOWIE and why it is we design the products like the way we do. Once they have this knowledge, they’ll happy to go ahead and share it with their friends and tell people this is why the mouse is designed like this, this is why I use it, why I like it in-game. And I think that is very important.

S: What are ZOWIE’s plans in the future in 2019?

P: Our plans are always the same, we want to keep providing gamers with the equipment they want to use. Over the years we have got suggestions, we’re always listening to gamers, trying to slowly improve & tweak the product to their preference.

Some people might like our products, some people might not. But we’re the only brand that makes mice in different shapes and sizes. And also all the technologies that we have on the monitors, we make it based on the games that are popular like CS:GO and PUBG. These are FPS Games so features like Black Equalizer, Color Vibrance, and Dynamic Accuracy (DyAc) all of this actually helps in the game and not just a bluff.

This is all that we are going to continue. You’ll see some new products coming out soon in this year too.

I’ve heard about Divina, an esports organization exclusively for female gamers.  What are ZOWIE’s plans for it?

Divina is a project started by the original Zowie team. This team was formed 10 years ago and is still working with Zowie in making new products. We believe that female gamers deserve a lot more attention than what they’re getting, because some of them are really great. There’s always this stigma and people don’t take them seriously. Recently in China we held an event, the ZOWIE DIVINA Women’s Invitational Tournament and many of the world’s best female gamers came and everyone was so surprised to see them having such high levels of skill.

For us, Divina is not exclusive to women. You’ll see a lot of pros, even s1mple, having the Divina version of Zowie gaming peripherals custom made for him. Many other professional gamers from Singapore have these peripherals. It is there for them to show their support for women’s esports. That is why we even released the first new design of the S series in Divina colors only.

This is all because we want to show people how important Divina is for us. Divina is a special project that is very dear to our hearts and all of us. Some of the Zowie’s original founders are fathers, and have got daughters as well. It’s very important for them that people treat women equally in esports. We’re organizing a lot of women’s tournaments to support women’s esports.

Any plans to launch in India soon?

India is one of those markets where we feel Divina will be very well recieved. We don’t have any partners here in India right now, but we’re always looking for partners that share the same vision as us and are not just trying to make money. They really believe in what we’re doing and we would love to find someone like that to work with, maybe we’ve found someone already but we haven’t really confirmed anything yet.

But if Indian Gamers want Divina products – let us know through our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media channels. We’re always looking forward to it!