Smart phone apps can wait

Last week was special for consumer goods major Hindustan Unilever and its advertising agency Lowe Lintas and Partners. At the Global Mobile Awards, the client and its agency were awarded the ‘Best Advertising or Marketing on Mobile’ for the year 2014, for their innovation Kan Khajura Tesan (KKT), a fully advertiser-funded mobile-based entertainment-on-demand initiative in India. The KKT is a ‘free mobile radio station’ in Bihar that enables users to access 15 minutes of content every week.

What prompted them to launch this campaign is the fact that a large percentage of the target group for HUL’s FMCG brands are in media-dark areas and cannot be reached via traditional media such as TV, radio and print. Further, in these rural and semi-rural areas, electricity is limited to only 20 per cent of the population, limiting access to TV and radio. The need was to use a device whose reach spreads far wider than the combined might of traditional mass media. Hence, mobile phones.

Anaheeta Goenka, executive director, Lowe Lintas and Partners, India, says, “For Kan Khajura to take off, we needed people to take the first step and hence our singular task was to drive missed calls. Unlike all other mediums where you push the message out, here the consumer had to first call to even experience the content. The communication strategy was built around making them remember a 10-digit number, and call this number, again and again and again”. The agency now claims to be reaching out to more than five million consumers, and adds that the channel has now become the biggest radio station in the State that was otherwise termed ‘media-dark’.

Recently, HDFC Bank introduced a missed call service through which customers could get their bank balance instantly by giving a missed call to a pre-allotted number. Kartik Jain, Head - Marketing, HDFC Bank calls it one of the largest initiatives that the bank has undertaken in the mobile space and says that the response has been tremendous in areas where the service has been rolled out.

Other marketers such as Tata Global Beverages are recognising the power of the feature phone too. To give voice to women through its Tata Tea, Power of 49 campaign, the company started the ‘Push the Pin’ initiative to help women across India voice issues that they face in their daily lives and be agents of change. Push the Pin is available through IVRS/SMS route for feature phone users and through mobile sites for the smartphone users.

Company executives point out that the response on the mobile and IVRS platform has been very encouraging so far. They claim to have received over seven lakh calls through the IVRS route in just 15 days and response of around 30 per cent conversion from a call to submitting a local issue pin. These opinions will be later included in the manifesto that will be presented to the political parties.

“Using SMS and voice-based mobile campaigns is an integral part of all our digital initiatives. This helps us cater to our consumers with access to both feature phones and smartphones. Through mobile-based services (SMS, voice, social) we are able to engage deeper with our consumers who are not internet-savvy or are located in tier-2 or -3 cities and mostly live in media-dark areas where mobile phone is their only source of entertainment,” says Vikram Grover, Vice-President (Marketing), India and South Asia, Tata Global Beverages.

Even as the smartphone user base grows at breakneck speed, marketers still recognise the power of the feature phone in markets such as India. As Tata Global executives point out, India is the second largest country in terms of mobile user base with 950 million users and 170 million user access to mobile internet. Grover says, “With only 75 million smartphone users, the mass users are clearly in the non-mobile internet space driven by feature phones. In such a scenario mobile/IVRS mediums play a very crucial role.”

Sameer Ganapathy, Vice-President & Head – Interactive, Disney India, agrees. He says, “Feature phones form an important part of the mobile phone ecosystem in India. Even though the year-on-year growth of feature phones is on the decline, one cannot ignore the 600+ million audience using these handsets. We believe in creating and delivering engaging content across both feature phones and smartphones to reach out to maximum audience across the country. For example, when we developed the Chennai Express game, it was launched for both smartphones and feature phones and so did the Cricket T20 Fever, Cricket World Cup Fever and others.”

But some in the mobile space believe the distinction is not so much about smartphone users and non-smart phone users, but about phones that access data and phones that don’t. Sumesh Menon, CEO & Co-Founder, U2opia Mobile, says, “The upbeat smartphone adoption discussions overlook the fact that mobile data adoption has not followed at nearly the same pace. So, while the number of smartphone users is on the rise, only a fraction are using mobile data on those phones. As a result, this under-served mass of users that we are talking of is even wider than just feature phone users – it also includes a large percentage of smartphone users.”

He adds that while mobile marketing solutions for data-enabled users are aplenty, solutions that address non-data-enabled users are rare. “Marketers are now waking up to that reality and we are in talks with marketers across industries – agriculture, media, market research and many more – who are looking to reach out to the millions of sub-data users that our mobile platform Fonetwish addresses,” he says.

Sanchayeeta Verma, General Manager - South, Marketing and Advertising at media services agency Maxus cautions that when it comes to engaging users on mobile, it is crucial to provide a value that the brand brings to the customer rather than just conveying the brand message. After all, the mobile phone is a very personal device. Verma recommends that this can be done by providing engaging, useful content or providing direct incentive.

“There have been great responses for both the mechanisms. Options like free ringtone, wallpaper, song track, video content etc as an incentive are popular, but it limits scalability due to requirement of mobile internet in users’ devices. Other mechanisms like contests and sweepstakes are also popular among mobile users,” she says. With mobile phones becoming a crucial part of users’ lives, free airtime (talk–time) is becoming very popular, especially among the youth and rural users. Mobile airtime is instant and gives a great perceived value for the incentive and helps to register a great brand recall. “The engagement rate with the brand message increases significantly when we offer mobile airtime since it’s more like a pocket money for them,” says Verma. Hopefully, more and more marketers are taking note.

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