“Leading telecom
service provider in India.”

Conquering the market with practical result
oriented branding ideas!

Summary

Bharti Airtel Limited also known as Airtel is an Indian global telecommunications services company based in Delhi, India. It operates in 18 countries across South Asia and Africa, and also in the Channel Islands. Airtel provides GSM, 3G, 4G LTE mobile services, fixed line broadband, and voice services depending upon the country of operation. Airtel had also rolled out its VoLTE technology across all Indian telecom circles except Jammu and Kashmir and Andaman and is likely to launch in these circles soon. It is the Third largest mobile network operator in India and the Second largest mobile network operator in the world with over 293.79 million subscribers. Airtel was named India's second most valuable brand in the first ever Brandz ranking by Millward Brown and WPP Plc.

Challenge

The mobile subscriber base in India expanded to 670.6 million in August 2010 with the addition of 18.2 million new users during the month. Indian telecom is the fastest growing industry next only to the IT industry. It has been demonstrating strong growth due to Government support in the form of many regulatory and policy changes during the last 15 years. The industry has always surpassed the expectations of government targets particularly in the area of teledensity which has reached 59% now.

Insights

There are 15 telecom operators in the country today. In each circle, there are around 9-10 operators competing for the same revenue pie which is not growing. Lower tariff and high introductory offers which the industry saw during 2009 resulted in multiple SIM ownership and reduced realization per minute of use. The new operators who entered the market during 2009 offered subscriptions at throwaway prices loaded with free talk time. The incumbent operators are also forced to get into this tariff war and this converted the existing paying minutes to non paying minutes and slowed down the revenue growth of the sector. The revenue growth during the calendar year 2009 was just 12% as compared to 22% during the previous year 2008.

Solution

Outdoor Strategy

Brand associations with films have been quantified in two categories, in-film product placement, and co-branded marketing. The latter commands a greater share of brand association when it comes to films. While Hindi and English films corner the bulk of brand alliances, films in Marathi and south Indian languages are not far behind.

“Targeted marketing to the consumer has, therefore, become critical, and offers brands and film producers some insights into movie marketing in a media landscape that is so disruptive.”

The benefits of product placement can go well beyond on-screen exposure. You can promote the association with a film by generating internal and external promotional campaigns keyed to that movie. In-film branding inside commercial films is a highly cost-effective way to gain huge exposure and visibility at a fraction of the traditional advertising costs.