Har Ek Friend Zaroori Hota Hai
IT WAS THE year 2000. Our agency, FCB Ulka, had been invited by one of the new mobile service operators to pitch for their business. We realized that this was a big opportunity for the agency. We had bagged some fabulous advertising accounts in the late ’90s and the American major, Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB) had become a majority shareholder of the agency which was erstwhile known as Ulka Advertising. We knew nothing about how to drive subscribers to a new telecom brand. Mobile was the preserve of the affluent then. So in order to help us plan for the pitch we reached out to the FCB head office in New York. Fortunately for us, FCB had a long and illustrious history in telephone service advertising in the US. They had handled the AT&T long distance advertising for many years and had created some landmark campaigns for products like ‘One Rate Plan’. We had seen all this work and were quite excited to invite the global experts to help us plan the pitch.
As we were working through the mechanics of the presentation, we got talking about the players who had already entered the market. There was Airtel in Delhi. MaxTouch and BPL in Mumbai. Just as in the US, mobile service operators were selling a bundled plan to their buyers; the per-minute pulse rate was around ₹16; you had to commit to a plan that would cost you anything between ₹2000 to ₹2500 per month; your phone came bundled as a part of the plan. You had to give a deposit to the service provider and pay your bill promptly at the end of the month. In January 1999, Airtel had launched their prepaid card called ‘Magic’ in Delhi. We were intrigued by this new offering. So we sought the wisdom of our American colleagues to understand what pre-paid was all about. The answer we got, which we did not fully agree with, was indeed shocking. Our friends from the USA asked us, ‘Why would anyone buy a prepaid mobile card? In the US, only drug dealers use prepaid cards. We don’t think it makes much sense for your new client to even consider it!’
How wrong they were!
Prepaid cards transformed the Indian mobile services market by unlocking the mobile phone device, the complicated billing and collection system, and made mobile phone recharge cards something a small retailer could stock and sell!
I believe that prepaid cards revolutionized the Indian telecom industry pretty much like the shampoo sachet revolutionized the shampoo category. Prof. Venkat Ramaswamy of University of Michigan coined the term ‘Productization of Services and Servicization of Products’. It is becoming increasingly difficult to separate a product from a service. A car company makes more revenue from its service pack. And now a telecom service company retails its service through a refill card from a neighbourhood shop. And no example demonstrates this better than the way mobile operators like Airtel spread their reach. In 2014, over 90 per cent of all mobile subscriptions are prepaid. While I have a postpaid connection for my mobile phone, I only have a prepaid 3G connection for my iPad.
No other service has captured the imagination of the country like mobile phones, and advertising has had a big role in the growth of mobile services.
It all began in August 1995, when the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu made India’s first mobile phone call to the Union Telecom Minister Sukh Ram. By May 2012, India had over 900 million mobile subscribers. If we take out all the ‘dead’ numbers and dual-SIM ownerships, we are told that almost 77 per cent of over-twelve-year-olds in urban India have a mobile phone, according the Indian Readership Survey 2013. The number in reality may be a bit lower, but still, mobile phones are one of the most well-penetrated categories in the country. Bureaucrat and author Pavan Verma traces the growth thus: in 1948, India had a total of 80,000 telephone lines; when STD services were launched in 1961, there were one million lines; when economic reforms were initiated in 1991, there were 5 million; this grew to 37 million total connections (landline and mobile) in 2001; then the rocket fired to 350 million in 2009 to 950 million connections in 20121.
Airtel was the first operator to use the star power of Shah Rukh Khan to drive mobile consumption. In one of their early ads created by Rediffusion for prepaid mobile phones, they even used a paan shop as a location. A young couple is at a paan shop. We hear the phone ringing. The customer pulls out his phone from his pocket. No, it is not ringing. The lady asks him to check her phone which is also in his pocket. It too is silent. The paan shop owner pulls out his phone from the drawer but his phone too is silent. Then we hear the shop assistant, who is sitting beneath the elevated shop front sorting betel leaves, talking loudly into his mobile phone. I think in my mind that advertisement communicated succinctly how everyone can now own a mobile phone. You don’t have to be an affluent customer or a shopkeeper, even a shopkeeper’s assistant can have a mobile phone.
Mobile service in the country got a fillip when Reliance Mobile was launched through a very disruptive rate plan on 28 December 2002, the birth date of Reliance Group founder, Dhirubhai Ambani. AG Krishnamurthy, founder of Mudra, recalls how the launch of Reliance Mobile was a fulfilment of Dhirubhai Ambani’s dream of giving every Indian the power of mobile telephony2. The print ads proclaimed ‘Roti, kapda, makaan aur mobile’ meaning food, clothing, shelter and mobile, while the television films offered Reliance Mobile as ‘Kar lo duniya mutthi mein’ (Take the world in your hand). The brand also featured cricket star Virendra Sehwag as a symbol with the Sehwag Ki Ma film where Sehwag, the swashbuckling Indian batsman, gets a message from his mother wishing him luck. The deep-pocketed operator decided to give incoming calls for free. This quickly moved all other operators to make incoming calls free, and call rates were dropped as well. So though the trend of not picking up an incoming call due to the fear of being charged for it faded away; the concept of the ‘missed call’ continues as Indians have figured out something that is even lower than the lowest call rate offered in the world – which is that ‘missed calls’ are free. Launched in December 2002, Reliance Mobile offered a phenomenal deal to poor users by offering a bundled phone for as low as a few hundred rupees a month. It spurred all other operators to review their own rates and that led to further reduction in tariffs.
With the launch of Magic from Airtel, and others quickly followed, the mobile instrument was delinked from the tariff plan. So from the days when you had to pay a fixed amount every month, you could pay for your incoming calls and outgoing calls, Indian mobile users were free to pick the mobile phone they wanted, spend exactly what they wanted to spend and get incoming calls for free.
This setting was further disrupted by the launch of Tata Docomo in the year 2008. Being the eighth entrant to join the game, the operator chose to innovate with its tariff plans and offer a ‘per second billing plan’. Till then, Indian users of mobile phones were paying for a full minute even if they used just 20 or 30 or 40 seconds. The advertising for Tata Docomo shows a man sitting in an aircraft, in the middle seat. An elderly gentleman approaches with presumably his daughter, who sits down next to the young man. He is happy but the father returns requesting him to exchange his seat as he wanted to sit with his daughter. Our young hero is a little crestfallen, moves out and goes looking for his new seat. And lady luck smiles. He is seated between two beautiful girls, dressed in skimpy clothes. He smiles as the voiceover says, ‘When life can change in seconds, why pay in minutes?’ The campaign managed to drive Tata Docomo to the top spot in acquisition in every single market. The market leaders reacted and the entire industry started talking of ‘pay per second’ plans.
As rate wars erupted, three operators managed to create their own identity in the market. Idea cellular, owned by Aditya Birla, decided to stick with socially-conscious messaging about using the mobile phone to achieve social good. Their brand ambassador, Abhishek Bachchan, offers the Idea brand to solve many problems, including internecine battles in villages, marital discord, the literacy problem and more with a catchy line, ‘What an Idea, Sirji!’ Interestingly, a similar term was often used by the famous comedian of Bollywood, Johnny Walker, in the film Aar Paar: ‘What is your idea?’
Airtel too has h
ad its share of great advertising that cut across barriers. One of its brand ads – that did not tout a rate or a pack – was the famous ‘Football’ ad. A little boy is having his food when he sees a football bounce outside his window. He goes out to find another boy standing on the other side of a heavy barbed-wire fence, in what looks like the border between two warring countries. The owner of the football cajoles the kid across the barrier to kick the ball back. They further cement their friendship by getting into the no-man’s land and playing football. The kids speak a language which no one in India would have understood. The voiceover at the end explains, ‘There is no wall, no barrier that can keep us apart, if only we talk to each other.’ The Airtel musical signature created by AR Rahman takes over as the kids play on, laughing and talking. Created by Chax (KS Chakravarty), then at Rediffusion, it continues to be one of the all-time great mobile service ads.
In 2012, Airtel unleashed the ‘Har ek friend zaroori hota hai’ campaign where the jingle explains that every young Indian has a unique bunch of friends: those who help; those who seek help; those who borrow; those who lend etc. Set to a very hummable tune, the ad was a great hit. In the process, making Airtel appear cool and young to its users. Agnello Dias of Taproot was the master creative director behind this ad which helped launch his agency into the big league.
If Airtel has played the young kid card, Hutch, now rebranded as Vodafone, too has tugged at the heartstrings of viewers. In the 2005 period, they introduced to India a new breed of dogs. The ad has a little boy being followed right through the day by a pug. The message said, ‘Wherever you go, our network follows.’ A couple of years later, they changed the boy to a girl but the pug remained. Animal activist Menaka Gandhi at an award function in 2014 singled out this ad for criticism saying that it created an artificial demand for pugs who are by nature not suited for Indian climate. Further, she pointed out that pugs are so small-limbed and fragile that they can rarely have a natural birth process. Though this is probably true, the film created by Ogilvy & Mather was a big hit with viewers.
Vodafone followed the pug with yet another interesting character called the ZooZoo in 2009. Using these Martian-like characters, Vodafone wooed the Indian Premier League cricket fans with a new ad a day for the entire second season in 2009. The ZooZoos, created by Rajiv Rao of Ogilvy & Mather, could be called the biggest ad icon of this decade. In fact, PETA or People for Ethical Treatment of Animals awarded the brand for replacing the pug with a more humane alternative, the ZooZoos.
Consumers seem to be enticed by children and childlike characters says Mary Bourdeau. In a Mind of Market study, it was found that in judging sincerity, both consumers and creative staff unconsciously use criteria related to ‘neoteny’ which means the retention of juvenile features in the adult animal. This is directly related to people’s fascination with infants and baby animals. Neotenous characteristics include large, round eyes and high foreheads that remind us of infancy, innocence and naivete. People perceive message transmitted by a baby-faced person as more sincere because they see babies as innocent and honest, says Professor Gerald Zaltman3.
As mobile service providers continued their advertising barrage, mobile handsets, once unlocked, also started wooing customers. Interestingly, the first ever Indian ad to win the prestigious Cannes Lion for television was an ad credited to the agency Nexus Equity for Ericsson mobile phones in 1996. Made to demonstrate how tiny the phone was, it showed a lady speaking to someone on the phone while an elderly gentleman across the table thinks she is talking to him: ‘Hello!’ ‘Hi!’ ‘What are you doing tonight?’ ‘Me?’ ‘Join me for dinner?’ Sure!’ The man gets up and walks across to the lady’s table as she finishes her call – he sees her mobile phone only then. She and mistakes him for the steward of the restaurant and asks him for ‘One black coffee, please’. The film co-written and directed by Prasoon Pandey, with Piyush Pandey, was widely seen as the first significant winner from India at the Cannes ad awards festival.
Nokia innovated with mobile phones for India providing torchlight-enabled phones, rugged phones and more. Nokia phones were known for their almost-indestructible quality.
Indian brands jumped in and companies like Micromax, Karbonn and Lava have risen in the years 2010 to 2015. Samsung has emerged as the leader with a market share of over 15 per cent. Nokia, after a fall from 40 per cent market share, is rising once again to 10 per cent. There are so many new brands entering the market that the leader board is bound to change every few years. While the top three positions may stay constant, all other spots are up for grabs.
What has driven this mobile phone mania?
In the early 1980s, it took many years to get a landline phone. The shortage was so acute that the government set up a special commission to accelerate the usage of phones. The first move entailed setting up phone booths across the country. Pioneered by Sam Pitroda, these yellow colour-coded public phone centres offered STD and ISD facilities, and got the lower classes used to the concept of a phone call. So when the mobile phone revolution started in the late 1990s, the country was waiting for it, almost. By September 2004, the number of mobile phone connections overtook the number of fixed landline connections and there was no looking back.
DIGITAL VIDEOS: Brands are discovering the joy of long format storytelling with the opening up of the digital medium. Interestingly, the first to use this in a big way was the auto major BMW with its ‘Hire’ series of films, done even before the birth of YouTube. Match that for innovation.
When fishermen in Kerala made calls from their mobile phones from the high seas to decide which seaside town to head towards to get the best price for their catch, you know something major is afoot. Every plumber, carpenter, service provider in India today has a mobile phone, just as PK Dubey of the movie Monsoon Wedding. The Economist speaks about how a 10 per cent increase in mobile phone penetration can increase a nation’s GDP by 1 per cent4.
In 2008, I had spent a day at EMRI, the emergency services NGO in Andhra Pradesh. Set up by the much-maligned Satyam’s Ramalinga Raju, it was run by Venkat Changavalli, a veteran from the corporate world. While speaking with him, I discovered that over 80 per cent of the emergency calls they were getting were from mobile phones.
Using the power of the phone, young entrepreneur VSS Mani set up Justdial services to give you instant answers to your problems. His service too gets almost all its calls from mobile phones.
In a strange jump of faith, Indians moved from a situation of standing in a queue outside an STD booth to having a phone in their pocket. While the penetration level of mobile phones is reported at 77 per cent, chances are that in over half of those homes there would be no landline. If 1995 was a stellar year for mobile phones, in a strange bit of serendipity, it was also the year VSNL launched Internet services in India. In a sense, Internet entered India a lot quicker than mobile services and both together are changing and will change the country in the coming years.
Today there are more users of Internet on mobile phones than those who access the Net from a computer or a laptop. In mid-2015, there were over 700 million mobile phone users, of which over 100 million are smartphone users and their numbers are jumping up every month. No wonder global experts such as Chris Houghton, head of India region for Swedish telecom equipment major Ericsson – they sold their handset business to Sony – says that Indians spend three hours daily on their phones and 25 per cent check their phones 100 times a day; Times of India, 6 April 20155. This compares well with the global and US studies where it is shown that an average mobile phone user looks at his phone 150 times a day; 60 per cent don’t go a waking hour without looking at their mobile phone; 40 per cent even admit to checking their mobile phones while in the toilet6.
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are seeing a large part of their traffic coming from mobile phones. Websites are today designed for mobile phones and the term RWD, or responsive web design, is a common currency. Google too has been doing its bit to sprea
d the word about the Internet. E-commerce vendors are driving up Internet usage and some of them have totally abandoned all other forms except mobile. They too, like mobile service providers, have gone in for a payment system that reduces the buyer risk, by their ‘payment on delivery’ model.
TWITTER STORM: Brands are today waking up to tracking what social media is saying. And are gearing up to respond quickly and responsibly. Many a Twitter storm has been created thanks to some immature response to a customer complaint. So the Twitter handle of a brand better be in the hands of someone responsible and responsive.
The coming years will see further innovation in the mobile Internet space. Banks are already advertising mobile bank accounts. The government is speaking of mobile cash transfer. Service providers are also advertising to spread the message.
The year 2015 has seen a lot of debate on net neutrality and hopefully the dust will settle on this issue soon so that there is a fair way through which service providers, consumers, digital content creators, e-commerce vendors, social media platforms can all help each other.
A lot has happened in India in the last fifteen years. Indian mobile brands have shown a way of overcoming hurdles posed by our financial legal systems to drive consumers to the new service. A lot should happen in the coming years to help Indians benefit from the dumb instrument in their pocket. Imagine a service that offers tuition classes on the mobile phone? Or an English tutor who uses his cellphone to conduct daily quizzes?
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