Airtel’s new ad attempts to block its consumers’ mind space in a market cluttered with aggressive plans.
The latest advertisement of Bharti Airtel tells the story of Shah Rukh Khan — how he started from scratch and achieved stardom with help provided by people along the way. Success comes from relationships, and a man is all about the relationships he has welded together in life.
Bharti Airtel has for long tried to create an emotional connect in its campaigns. Alone we despair; together, we have great hope. In its latest ad, it has tried to fine tune that message. While earlier ads showed one to one relationships, the Khan ad for the first time links one to many. The campaign with Shreyas Talpade, for instance, focused on the relationship between a father and his son who has ventured out of the village. The one with Vidya Balan and Madhavan worked on the chemistry between newly weds. The famous “Barriers break when people talk” ad showed how two boys in a war-torn zone come together for a game of football.
The new ad links Khan to the people who helped him grow in life — friends from his childhood in Delhi, a girl who believed in him and a teacher who showed him the way. Shot in Delhi and Mumbai, it opens with Khan on a terrace — the semblance with a king surveying his kingdom is unmistakable. “Akele hum kuch bhi nahin,” (Alone, we are nobody) the superstar intones. “Jab 110 million log sath hon, to achcha his hoga” (When 110 million people are with you, good things are bound to happen).
Brand reassurance
The telecom space has got overcrowded, to say the least. There are five to six service operators in each telecom circle — there are 22 in the country. And more want to join the bandwagon. The market continues to grow at a scorching pace. From 450 million subscribers now, it is expected to swell to 750 million by 2012. Every telecom service operator in the world wants a piece of the action. So much so, large Indian operators have begun to look abroad for growth. The Khan ad, Bharti Airtel hopes, will help it break through that clutter.
“The campaign’s philosophy,” says Bharti Airtel Senior Vice-president (marketing) and Head (brand and media) R Chandrasekar, “is that no man is an island. Each of us is an accumulation of people, relationships and experiences.” The country’s largest operator of telephony services wants to leverage its 110-million strong network. “People are made of people,” says Chandrasekar. The campaign, he adds, gives the reassurance of being a part of a large brand to not just the company’s consumers but also its channel partners and employees.
The ad has been conceived by Rediff and shot by Good Morning Films. The script has been written by Deepesh Jha. To make an impact, it runs in Hindi and other Indian languages. There is no English version of the ad.
The timing of the campaign is important. The market at the moment seems to be moving towards subscription schemes or “plans” put out by companies from brand-building. New GSM players like Tata DoCoMo, MTS and Reliance Communications have come out with plans that, they are convinced, will blaze a whole new trail. Tata DoCoMo has introduced a plan based on the duration of the call (one paisa per second) and the length of the SMS. MTS has a similar scheme running. Reliance Communication has cut the price of all local and long-distance calls within the country to 50 paisa. Telecom analysts expect telecom tariffs to fall another 10 to 25 per cent.
As the market leader, Bharti Airtel clearly cannot be seen as duplicating the plans devised by others. In the past, it has countered aggressive plans of rivals with innovative campaigns. The “Barriers break when people talk” campaign was launched towards the end of 2006 when rivals like Vodafone and Idea Cellular had dropped tariffs. A similar strategy is at work this time too. It is certain that sooner than later Bharti Airtel too will come out with a plan to counter the rivals. But it has to block the mind space of its consumers till that time with some catchy advertisements. This is what, it hopes, the Khan campaign will do. Chandrasekar calls it the discipline of the market leader.
New logo
Along with the advertisement, Bharti Airtel has refreshed its logo. It is now made up of faces to drive home the point of a large network and the importance of human relationships. The company is learnt to have painted no less than 20,000 billboards across the country with the new logo. Some electronic billboards will offer people the option to put their photograph in the collection of faces on the logo. A similar initiative for the web will also be launched.
With the new ad playing on television screens across the country, Bharti Airtel has put on hold all other campaigns. The company is likely to revisit it in a few months’ time. Meanwhile, Tata DoCoMo has come out with a new campaign that is somewhat similar: Why walk alone when you can dance together? It highlights, according to company officials, the significant network of people that have come on board Tata DoCoMo and the advantages of such a network. Industry experts say it aims to create awareness of the DoCoMo brand and popularise its tune — not very different from what Bharti Airtel did several years ago when musician AR Rahman composed its signature tune.
Some rivals say Bharti Airtel has lost its magic touch. It had bet on the Champions Trophy played in South Africa and the T20 Champions League in India. But both failed to strike a chord with television viewers. The final numbers, says Chandrsekaran, are yet to come in, but the initial numbers suggest the viewership wasn’t too bad.
Also, some experts firmly believe that telecom services are quite similar. So, it is advisable for companies to spend ad money on plans and value-added services. According to London School of Business Professor (marketing) Nirmalya Kumar, telecom brands are a mile wide but only an inch deep. It remains to be seen if Khan can do the job for Bharti Airtel.
