Mobile communication which was once considered a luxury is now a necessity for masses with almost zero switching cost. The erosion in calling rates has made India world’s second most affordable mobile economy. India saw a phenomenal decadal growth in mobile telecom. The impact was far reaching as Mobile operators touched lives of 900Mn people by June 2012.
More than 50% growth in mobile subscription yoy aided Telcos to reap benefits of economies of scale and cope with falling call rates over the years. The continued growth has resulted in more than 100% mobile penetration in urban areas and around 50% in rural areas.
With growth in mobile subscribers becoming almost stagnant in urban areas, Telcos are faced with declining ARPU’s, high cost burden, rising spectrum prices constant pressure to acquire spectrum in order to serve a larger customer base, piled up inactive connections and majority of subscriber additions coming in from rural areas who are generally low balance customers.

The situation has induced telcos to eye on branding and promotions aggressively with a very little scope left to add subscribers in urban areas on a large scale.
Every service provider is now aiming at designing strategies to reposition and enhancing visibility with their innovational ad campaigns and promotional offers.

Branding
Innovational Ad Campaigns
The ‘Hunny Bunny’ ad by Idea Cellular was vague but attention seeking campaign that recorded around 1 Mn hits on you tube and maximum ringtone downloads. The ad featured people from every age group and every geographic location. This indicates Idea’s strategy of targeting people from every age group and keeping everyone connected irrespective of their location along with a message of ‘Keeping United’. Idea follows a socializing strategy and is known for airing ads that carry a social message.

While Idea aims at targeting all the age groups, Airtel is aggressively positioning itself as a ‘Youngster Led Telco’ . The ‘Har Ek Friend Zaruri Hota Hai Campaign’ indicated a shift from regular celebrity endorsements, featured a segment and a jingle that would relate to the youngsters in real sense. The jingle could be heard on cell phones of every school and college students. The ad went viral with multiple ringtone downloads and text forwards. This was the most successful and highly appreciated ad campaign that Airtel had aired till date. The strategy is a wise move as voice revenues stabilize for Telcos and young audience will be the ones to adopt the gen next services coming on board like data, VAS, mobile broadband etc.

Vodafone focus on targeting youngsters, but with a different positioning strategy of ‘Custom Made Offerings’. The ‘Made for You’ ad campaign featuring youngsters with different needs in a humorous context helped Vodafone to permeate within the set of youngsters that behave in a similar fashion. The ad campaign depicts Vodafone’s focus on designing bundled talk time and data plans to suit the requirements of young audience. This was the first time ever Vodafone sent the ‘Running Pug’ on rest and actually exemplified its ‘Made for You’ campaign by customizing its own advertisement strategy.

All the above advertisement campaigns had some things in common like shift from
• Celebrity endorsements
• Featuring a set of people that audience could relate to
• A message

Reviving Brand Identity
Airtel and Vodafone have revived the brand logos to align and reflect their positioning strategy. The new logos have a new font, color and design conveying a message that the operators are changing with time to serve the evolving needs of their customers as ‘Change is the only constant’.

Maximizing Reach
Identifying touch points that may lead to business development: Uninor in its unique initiative of expanding the touch points and reach maximum prospective customers will now rope in auto rikshaw drivers, milkmen to sell connections and do a recharge. Vodafone is already pushing sales in remote areas through an army of female retailers. The company has trained women who were tea stall vendors, fruit and vegetable sellers to sell its recharge vouchers and E-Top Ups. Similarly Aircel has reached out to the families of dealers to involve women and rewarding the wives of the highest performing dealers.

Promotions
Bundled Offerings
Telcos now eye on bundling services with applications, devices, VAS, data, special tariff vouchers to attract subscribers.

Devices: Aircel registered record sale of connections bundled with i-phone 2S at a price of INR 13000/- in 2012. Similarly Airtel, Vodafone and Idea are eyeing to bring on board multiple brands of devices and bundle them with talk time and data. The strategy is helping telcos to earn margins on devices as well as revenues from voice and data

Data: Airtel has recently announced unlimited 3G data for a month to new postpaid customers and also to the customers coming on the network through MNP. All the telcos are bundling their data plans on devices and offering unlimited internet usage for a limited time period

Applications: Reliance has tied up with Whats App to offer ‘IM’ to its subscribers similarly Airtel has launched its own app store recently.

VAS : Telcos are now entering into alliances with multiple entertainment and need based value added service providers to attract subscribers. Vodafone India has tied up with mobile VAS provider Handygo Technologies to launch IVR based service called Behtar Zindagi for rural India. Airtel has tied up with Axis Bank to launched Airtel money for Axis Bank customers using Airtel network. Tata Docomo has tied up with online music store Saavn for offering music led data plans to its subscribers

STV : All the operators keep launching circle specific special tariff vouchers that give benefit of reduced call rates

All the promotional efforts by Telcos are short termed and keep revising based on the needs of the end customers and in alignment with the overall objective of telco

Way Forward

The branding and promotion efforts would further intensify as new additions stagnate and telcos are left with no choice but to penetrate in the market share of rival players to grow and survive.