Restoring the sheen

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Reliance Communications is trying to change its brand image with a big-budget campaign.

Across-country auto racer is preparing for an event. But his thoughts are clearly elsewhere: his wife is about to have their first baby. As he gets into the vehicle, his navigator friend inserts an Internet data card into the laptop.

Over the next couple of days, the driver alternates between zipping past an everchanging landscape and exchanging possible names for the baby on online chat with his wife.

Then she goes offline and he's worried. Meanwhile, other cars are catching up. When she finally comes back online, he's so moved, he stops the car. As the others vroom past him to the finish, our driver is clearly caught up in a very personal celebration: his baby's photograph on the computer. The race is forgotten.

The tagline comes on: "Discover net connect. Discover Reliance Communications: connects over 7,500 towns and 3,00,000 villages."

This is a marathon, 90-second ad film for Reliance Communications, part of the company's first big-budget ad campaign since the division in the Reliance group last year. Under the terms of the agreement between the Ambani brothers, Anil Ambani took control of Reliance Infocomm and the company was renamed.

The present campaign has a clear focus: it aims to reposition Reliance Communications as something that is much more than a cellular services company. That has its roots in a survey conducted by research agency ACNielsen in early 2006 (when the company was being restructured) to study Reliance Communication's brand equity.

The nationwide research that took notes from about 10,000 respondents brought back a mixed bag of results. While a large portion of the respondents saw the company as a leader with good value-for-money offerings, a significant portion of elite users saw it as a cheap service provider, something with which they didn't want to associate.

Also, most respondents only saw it as a mobile company and not as the largest integrated telecom company. "The brand was seen as low cost and mass. Despite being the largest telecom company, Reliance Communications did not have the same sheen as Hutch or Airtel," says Mani, president, Mudra Communications.

Mudra has handled the brand since inception, and after the restructuring, the responsibility to build Reliance Communications' corporate identity was again handed over to the agency. The brief for this campaign came from straight from the top. Anil Ambani's message was apparently short and to-the-point:

Every one must know that Reliance Communications is much more than just a mobile phones company. "We wanted to showcase all the capabilities of our company. We wanted to highlight our lesser-known businesses," says Sanjay Behl, head branding, Reliance Communications.

Accordingly, the current campaign, which began last month, has 11 ads, each of which focuses on a separate business areas. Five films are already on air, while the others will be broadcast in the coming weeks. A 40-second film extols Reliance's PCO service, while two 30-seconders feature the company's enterprise-aimed solutions such as its data centre and video conferencing facilities.

When rains wreaked havoc in Mumbai two years ago, many companies lost valuable data. Reliance's data centre situated at DAKC Kansoli, Mumbai, is built to resist all natural calamities, even earthquakes. One commercial highlights this by showing the converse: employees are running out of a quake-hit building, except for two loyal systems workers who run in the opposite direction to save the company's server.

According to Behl, the campaign's aim is not to generate sales. "It is a large-scale brand-building exercise aimed at shareholders, strategic partners and corporates "" a potential consumer base for the other services offered by the company," he says.

Reliance Communications has booked over 300 spots a day across 35 cable channels. The commercials for its mobility, PCO and Internet connectivity are aired on mass Hindi channels such as Star Plus, Sony and Zee. At the same time, advertisements for the enterprise solutions business, targeted at businessmen and companies, are being aired on channels such as CNBC, NDTV and CNN.

The company is also using the print medium and Internet in a big way to reach out a larger audience. Its advertisements are appearing in many financial dailies and prominent magazines such as India Today, BusinessWeek and Time. On the Internet, Reliance Communications has opted for news websites of financial dailies for advertisements targeted at the corporate sector, while the regular ads aimed at mass audience go on popular email sites such as Yahoo! and Rediff.

According to industry estimates, the company is believed to have spent Rs 20-30 crore on the campaign in the first six weeks itself. However, this big budget campaign ignores outdoor advertising and radio. Why? "Radio and outdoors are good reminders for sales, but they aren't good equity builders. They couldn't have captured or conveyed the essence of our campaign," responds Mudra's Mani.

The campaign is likely to continue for two more months. After that, the company plans to use the commercials selectively through the year between sales-targeted campaigns.