Zomato has found a way to enter the CAT conversation without talking about CAT at all.
The food-delivery platform’s latest topical creative takes a familiar pain point for MBA aspirants, the race to score a 99th percentile and get into an IIM and flips it into a brand flex.
The line reads: “Getting into IIM is easy. We do it 300 times a day.”
The joke works on a simple double meaning. While students spend months chasing a 99-plus percentile to get an IIM call, Zomato claims it effectively “gets into” IIMs hundreds of times every day through its delivery network.
Rather than explaining the joke, the creative lets the “300 times a day” line do the work.
It turns Zomato’s delivery frequency into a playful comparison with the difficulty of getting admission into an Indian Institute of Management. The brand isn’t claiming academic achievement; it is deliberately hijacking the language of the CAT season to talk about its own everyday scale.
And that is precisely what has caught attention on LinkedIn.
Akash Shinde, who posted about the creative, called out the timing as its smartest element, noting that Zomato has stepped into a conversation that is already dominating the minds of CAT aspirants rather than attempting to create an entirely new one.
The creative lands because CAT anxiety is already a live cultural conversation.
For aspirants, the 99th percentile represents an almost mythical benchmark. Zomato takes that very specific piece of vocabulary and gives it a completely different meaning.
The result is a piece of topical advertising that requires almost no explanation.
The reactions under Shinde’s post reflect that. Comments describe the execution as Zomato “roasting” the situation, while others point to the timing as the strongest part of the idea. One commenter summed up the creative as turning a high-stakes milestone for students into a lighthearted measure of Zomato’s delivery scale.
For Zomato, it is another example of a familiar playbook: spot what people are already talking about, find the brand’s connection to it and make the connection funny enough to share.
