Airtel: Simply does it

Airtel’s brief to ace bollywood music director A.R. Rahman in 2002 was to create a tune that would appeal to not just the viewers, but also the listeners, of its advertisements. Rahman’s signature tune for Airtel is today the most downloaded piece of phone music on the planet. This year, Rahman composed afresh for the telecom giant’s campaign for the Delhi Half Marathon scheduled for November. The unambiguous brief this time was to reach out to children. Cell phone users are already furiously downloading the new tune.

Airtel has never been short of ideas on catchy ways of reaching out. Over the last couple of years, however, it has systematically shifted gears to focus on simplicity and transparency of its marketing efforts—to make its advertisements direct, honest and easily understandable. The Airtel tag line at one time goaded garrulous Indians to “Express Yourself”, is now a more functional “Breaking Barriers”. “Some found the earlier campaign too intellectual to be effective across the country,” concedes Manoj Kohli, CEO & Joint MD, Bharti Airtel.

Then, its ads have dropped all asterisks or “conditions apply” fine print after it cut its roaming tariffs earlier this year. The company is also de-cluttering its brands strategy and moving towards a single mother brand for its entire basket of offerings ranging from broadband, fixed line, cell phone and BlackBerry services to the latest product—satellite television. Several mini brands, such as Touchtel, India One and Magic, have been retired and the products repackaged as Airtel.

Challenge: Reach out to every Indian with one common message Strategy: Make the message direct, transparent and honest Outcome: Brand awareness and rapid growth in market share

Branding and marketing alone, however, cannot work if there aren’t well-targeted products to take to the market. Airtel seems to have cracked the code there, too. Its lifetime validity for pre-paid connections is a global first and is hugely popular.

How have these efforts fared? “Even those Indian villages that still have no roads or piped water and are yet to be electrified, are hooked to the global communications network,” gushes Kohli. “Little children in these villages may not know how to read or may not have ever seen a railway station, pucca roads or a water tap, but they know Airtel.”

Airtel’s network now covers more than 385,000 of India’s 650,000 villages. And the intensifying competition has still not dislodged Airtel from the top. It added more than 30 million customers over the last one year alone, and every third mobile user in India is its customer. Then, the company claims that an even higher proportion of high-end users are in its fold. Last month, Kohli was pleasantly surprised to find a van in Chhattisgarh that was backing up using the 2002 Rahman tune for its reverse gear horn. It seems Airtel is now part of India’s psyche.

—Puja Mehra