Marketing in Telecom

This May lot of action was seen in almost all big telecom companies in India. None of them wants to leave any prospective to be remained untapped. Ten years back, there was a term which was very popular and that was Cola Wars. One of the important strategies that Cola companies used to adopt was price wars. If one company slashes its prices, the second follow the suit. Same is being seen in the telecom space. Recently Vodafone has introduced a national STD pack of 75 paise/minute call on the purchase of 49 rupees card. Then Airtel introduced the same scheme but with 47 rupees card. One thing is sure that with all these promotion schemes, these companies would not get extra customer. Even if they get, it is very difficult to differentiate.

Second big marketing initiative in the last month was taken by Tata Indicom. Tata has introduced TV commercials stating that leave the normal technology and switch to Digital Technology where voice quality would be better. All these CDMA companies have tried their best to differentiate themselves  but could not make a mark in the minds of the customers. So positioning themselves as the digital network company, Tata indicom wants to have mind share of customers. But It is believed that most of the customers are not able to differentiate that Digital Network is same to CDMA.

Thirdly, the advertisement expense incurred by Idea. In NCR region, it has been found that Idea has purchased lot of billboard space, hoardings, Sunpacks etc. All these advertisements donot show any product, scheme or new offering. It is just Idea with a Yellow Background and ADITYA BIRLA GROUP written below. So they are just spending to increase the visibility of Idea as a brand and secondly to promote Idea as a company under the Aditya Birla Group, which may be termed as Empire Branding.

Recently one chain mail is going in lot of IT companies where in The Title of mail shows that it is an official Virgin Mobile Ad. It is very difficult to check the autneticity of the ad, but ad says that “We are more experienced than what our name Says”. It is really a nice ad or communication to show that we are not novice in the market.

All these big daddies are spending a lot in communicating and earning a large chunk of this sector. In India, there are more than 300 million mobile subscribers and it is to reach 500 million by 2012. So there is no recession in this sector and no company wants to go out of the sight of the customer.