He’s aware that most consumers buy telco plans based on price, not brand loyalty. But that hasn’t stopped him from approving a campaign so unique that it is being mimicked around the country.
Reddy is engaged in one of Southeast Asia’s fiercest industry battles. Long-standing veterans Telkomsel, XL and Indosat together command over 90 per cent of the market, leaving a cluster of challenger brands fighting for the remaining slice.
What’s puzzling is that despite the healthy competition, the country also posseses one of the lowest mobile penetration rates in the world, under 30 per cent. As an example of Indonesia’s notoriously wide income gap, the AB economic segment is almost fully saturated, with most members carrying at least two phones.
Hence, in a market space where advertisers typically shout about their lower prices, Reddy likes to whisper. “You need to be quiet to stand out,” he says. This does not come naturally to the gregarious marketeer. “I’ve been called many things, but quiet is hardly one of them,” he jokes.
His first ‘quiet’ campaign, introducing Hutchison, focuses on a single phrase: ‘Mau?’ This is Bahasa Indonesia vernacular, loosely equivalent to ‘wanna?’.
Against Indonesia’s landscape of ads for baby food and cooking oil, it is hard to miss Hutchison’s massive black billboards, which simply feature the word ‘Mau?’. The minimal executions hark back to the iconic ‘Got milk?’ campaign in the US.
Reddy also took an unusually emotive tack for another TVC that launched this month. The spot shows a group of village kids playing hide-and-seek’. But rather than run around to find his mates, the seeker whips out his mobile phone and text messages them.
Once their phones start beeping, he easily tags everyone. The proposition is shown at the end: if you join us today, you can send free SMS’ to another Hutchison customer.
“It’s such a boring message, but the spot invariably brings a smile to your face,” says Reddy,
“The difference is how you say it, not what you say.”
Sound simple? Reddy wants to keep it that way, though not without some frustration. “Simplicity is the most difficult thing for anyone to achieve,” he says.
“We’re trying to apply this to everything we do — products, pricing, messaging, packaging.”
Furthermore, as Reddy logs more time in the market, he finds this job increasingly challenging. “We’re in danger of losing the simplicity,” he says. “You begin wanting to say too many things at once.”
An immediate challenge is how to describe Hutchison’s unusual pricing schemes, which come in bundled packages rather than the one-off prices that the market is used to. Reddy hopes this will attract the mass of users who are turned off by Indonesia’s costly mobile fees. “What a user pays for a minute of phone-time here is the highest in the region,” says Reddy. “Compare this to the Philippines, a much poorer country, where penetration is 50 per cent. Why? Much lower rates per minute.”
Despite the plethora of telcos to choose from, only the top three are GSM-enabled, or in other words, accessible from anywhere in the country. The majority of telcos are fixed-wireless; free of charge within certain regions. But travel to the other part of the country and most telcos slap on roaming fees of three to four times per mintute.
Fortunately Reddy appears to have found good chemistry with his advertising partner, Matari-owned agency, Pantarei. His first move as CMO was to appoint the independent, locally-staffed boutique rather than one of the many MNCs vying for his business.
“They had fire in their belly,” Reddy recalls. “They’re a lean, small set-up with lots of personal involvement. To me, that’s all that really matters.”
He should know. After all, Reddy has fought for Hutchison in India and Thailand. In fact, he was responsible for bringing Hutchison Essar to India in 1995, where mobile phones were so unheard of that Reddy only bought his first one after after his job appointment. “Back then, the challenge was about educating the market about what a mobile phone was,” he says. “We were in India from the beginning. We were protecting our own turf, instead of eating into someone else’s.”
Suresh Reddy's CV...
2006 Chief marketing officer, Hutchison CP Telecommunications, Indonesia
2005 SVP, marketing, Hutchison CAT Wireless Multimedia, Thailand
1995 Assistant manager, marketing, Hutchison Essar, India
