All About... Mobile marketing in India

The decreased cost of services (call rates are as low as two US cents a minute) and competitive offers and facilities have made mobiles widely accessible. With the introduction of sub-$20 handsets, mobile players have started to look at rural India. This possibly is where the next big growth story for mobile operators is going to play out, even with hurdles such as erratic power supply and low literacy.

But despite the growth potential, most brands at present don’t have a specific marketing strategy for mobile, and according to industry experts, the medium as yet isn’t considered a serious option to supplement conventional media plans.

1 Given the slow uptake by marketers, Sandeep Tiwari, head of marketing at LG Electronics, advocates the need for specialised agencies that can understand the nuances of the medium. Most media planners admit that while media options have increased, the talent has not kept pace.
Although the basics of media skills in the mobile space remain the same, there’s a need for people who can adapt to the new technology and realtime data availability. While NRS has started mapping mobile, unlike YouTube, where the number of downloads indicate the level of interest, it has yet to develop an industry benchmark for measuring response.

2 SMS contests are currently the most common way of leveraging mobile power in India. Consumers are invited to participate in contests through traditional media and asked to respond using SMS. What makes this so popular is that the cost is partly borne by the consumer. “Mobile operators make money from consumer calls, consumers get to play games to win prizes and advertisers get consumers to interact with their brands,” says Anish Rajgopal, media manager, ITC Foods.

3 There’s also the SMS display route, which exposes consumers to advertising when they send messages to download live cricket scores, jokes, news and so on. ICICI Prudential’s diabetic profiling test via SMS, for example, not only collects data for marketers but also helps profile the customer and deliver coupons based on profiler results.

4 Mobisodes — 30-second video clips — are beginning to air in India. Cadbury, for instance, integrated the mobile medium in its campaign through animated mobisodes to strengthen consumers’ association with Cadbury Dairy Milk’s slogan, ‘Kuch meetha ho jaaye’.
Since mobile gaming is popular among young people, brands are designing games around their core proposition and hosting them on mobile operators’ portals, where consumers can download and play on a per-session basis. However, according to Alok Kejriwal, founder and chairman of Contests2win, most mobile phones in India are still entry-level handsets, therefore limiting the services which consumers can enjoy. Connection speeds will also remain an issue until the rollout of 3G in the country.

5 Companies like ITC Foods are experimenting with the interactive voice response system (IVRS), where SMS are sent to consumers asking them to call back and participate in voice-led contests. ITC Foods, for instance, has tied up with a third party to experiment with IVRS in Delhi for its Bingo chips brand.
Others such as Cadbury, which tied up with Reliance Mobile to promote its ‘Pappu Paas Ho Gaya’ campaign in 2005, are partnering with service providers. A student logging onto this Reliance service for exam results would receive the message ‘Congrats — Pappu pass ho gaya’ if he had passed.

6 For a brand, the challenge is to scale up the medium to involve more target groups and rejig the delivery mechanism to break through the clutter of marketing strategies and better engage consumers, says Rajgopal. “If 10 brands run similar contests, consumers will lose interest in them.” Intrusion into consumer privacy could, however, prove detrimental to the future of mobile marketing, he warns.

What it means for ... Advertisers

Mobile advertising can be personalised, focused and interactive, making marketing messages more like precision bombing than random shelling.

Consumers glance at their mobile screens at least 50 times a day, and with 40 per cent of the country expected to have access to cell services, it’s a critical time for advertisers to get on to the small screen and to reach consumers in rural India.

Response data coming in via SMS can be very effective. A snack food company, for instance, can use the responses to determine which part of the country the responses are coming from, at what time of day, demographics of the respondents and so on. The medium has built-in location finders.

...Agencies

According to Lodestar Universal Labcenter’s Mobilology study, most marketers target consumers with high usage. The report, however, states that the three broad marketing activities — awareness, lead generation and engagement activities — factors driving success vary in each case, underscoring the lack of understanding among advertisers in India.

Which suggests huge potential for those agencies that have the foresight now to invest in talent in this sector.