Value Added Services or only Value ?

The telecom services providers are pondering over ways to enhance sales and market share in the Indian market with intense competition. The number of players is increasing with two new players namely Virgin and Aircel. How does the players in this industry strategize so as to attain their objectives?

These companies are resorting to various means in order to gain market share. Vodafone came up with the much hyped Zoozoo campaign while Idea came up with a new idea during the IPL season 2 (Click here for more details). All these companies are now trying to sell their Value Added Services or VAS.

Well, I really don't think that it's a great strategy to promote VAS now, when the world economy is hit by recession. The common people are struggling to avert receiving pink slips. Analysts are working hard to speculate the after math of recession. As such, there is a lot of uncertainity around and the entire financial structure of the country isn't in great health.

As such, who cares about getting beauty tips or cricket scores? The masses now want to stay connected in the cheapest possible rates with absolutely no inclination towards any kind of value added services. They rather want value for money.

In this context, the attempts of several players is laudable. Airtel, which is positioned around knitting relationships, lowered its STD tariffs some time back. Virgin mobile, which is the fastest growing mobile operator has further lowered the STD and local call rates to 50paise per minute.

Well, I think revising the pricing strtegies is the need of the hour and not VAS. Let us see how these VAS providers and promoters fare against those who could feel the pulse of customers based on heinous market scenario.

Recession isn't that bad

When the recession has hit the world heinously, marketers have found a way to beat its effect. They have devised ways to capitalize on it.

I am talking about the new Airtel TVCs, featuring R. Madhavan and Vidya Balan. The commercials emphasize on relationships and not money, whether it is recession or not. Click here to see the commercial. 

The company has always had a positioning of fostering relations. Even now, the positioning is same as ever, but the theme has been altered and fabricated around recession. Here, company also communicates its lowering of tariffs to sustain the product's value proposition, complementing the brand image.

As such, marketers do find a way to find positives in negatives. The campaign seems to be impressive. Almost all of  marketing mix elements have been altered including price, promotion and product (inclusion of M-commerce). Lets see how sales complement this new strategy with modified marketing mix.

Recession and Consumer Behavior

One of my friends went for a job interview and the topic for group discussion was "Effects of recession on Consumer Behavior". My friend is in Finance stream, and so he couldn't speak much on it, but this led me into deep thinking.

Recession has badly hit the world and almost all businesses are striving to atleast survive. How do marketers measure Consumer Behavior (CB) in a recession-hit scenario?

The process of Consumption Behavior is a congregation of four consecutive psychological domains, all backed by a common domain of Personality. These four psychological factors are Motivation, Perception, Learning and Attitude. 

The essence of CB is that consumers of a segment depict more or less uniform behavior and that is what is capitaised on by marketers. Now, as there is recession, the behavior of consumers have changed drastically. For eg: A consumer may have a favorable attitude towards say, Gucci watch, but his attitude towards purchase behavior may be unfavorable. He may like Gucci as a brand, but may not have resources to buy it. As such, marketers can't conclude anything about consumer attitude, if they aren't buying a particular product.

So, how to tackle this situation? Well, in current situation, not only economies, but consumers too are in deep liquidity crunch. As such, consumer attitude is dictated by pricing. Consumers want value for money. So, marketers must give them cost-effective or efficiency pricing, and that's how marketers can mould the attitude of consumers towards their offerings.

Let's just wait and watch the actions of marketers and then draw a conclusion in this context.