“We’ve taken thought leadership,” says Pradeep Shrivastava, CMO, Idea Cellular

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Ever since, Idea Cellular came solely under the Aditya Birla group, we have been amongst the fastest growing telecom companies in India and are among the first three operators in almost every circle that we are present in. On a national scale, we are currently growing at a very fast pace, with 18 million subscribers presently. Our growing subscriber base has urged us to grow substantially in our brand communication too.

The recent commercial of Idea Cellular (the one featuring Abhishek Bachchan) has won positive feedback from various stakeholders including consumers, dealers and the management, largely because of its clutter breaking attributes. Telecom as a sector has become highly commoditised in India, wherein most players have chosen to harp on their better network. The reality is that everyone has a near-similar network – so that’s a relatively comparable product attribute. The same is true for tariffs or even other value added services.

With this commercial, we have taken thought leadership in the segment and have steered clear of the me-too/ mine-is bigger kind of approach. As a brand, Idea is about celebrating such ideas; and mind you, this is not CSR.

To strike the right chord with the audience, the team from Idea Cellular sat for multiple briefing sessions with the creative team from Lowe, led by Balki to finally freeze on this communication. The plan is not to sit tight with the present idea of caste, but to extend it to even religion and gender in times to come. This is just the first step forward. We have used the rural setting to target the rural audience, in the midst of the changing socio-economic profile of the telecom consumer (the large number of women, youth and semi-urban and rural audience being added to our kitty over the last couple of years).

The inherent Indian-ness of the ad was unintentional, although over the last 5-6 years our advertising has largely been very aspirational and westernised. The intent this time was to establish an emotional connect with a much larger audience, across age, class and gender. We are following up this ad campaign with a host of below-the-line activities to connect with the consumer at the ground level, across multiplexes and villages. Same thematic taken to ground events and contests depending on the target audience.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2008

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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