Kan-khajura Tesan

Communication is the means of getting messages across to potential consumers. In mass

marketing, people are ‘sprayed’ with advertising and they turn up in large numbers to buy the
goods that they see on TV or newspapers. But what if TV and newspapers were only available in
limited numbers and areas? This is the difficulty that managers and companies face when they wish
to serve rural markets. In the absence of mass media, local media must be used. More than that,
innovative ideas and campaigns have to be devised.
This case study shows how a company developed its own communication channel through a
completely out-of-the-box thinking. HUL, the country’s largest consumer goods maker, has
introduced a unique concept in reaching out to rural customers. It runs KKT, a free radio-on-
demand service to reach out to villagers in remote areas. The KKT, translated as ‘ear centipede’, is
already the largest radio station in Bihar in terms of subscribers. It is an amazing innovation in
rural communication.
KKT is India’s first free and on-demand entertainment mobile radio channel. It is one of the
fastest growing media channels in India. It was launched in October 2013 in Bihar and Jharkhand
and the service was expanded in August 2014 across Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh,
Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra.
The tagline of the station is: Missed call lagao, muft manoranjan pao. It is an entertainment channel
on the mobile platform: a mobile phone user gives a missed call to the number 180030000123 to
immediately get a return call that plays KKT for 15 minutes. Besides entertainment programmes,
the channel plays advertisements of HUL brands.
The Economic Times (2014) reports that in villages of Bihar, people regularly listen to movie
songs, dialogues, radio jockey talk, jokes and shayari on their mobile phones. There is no FM
station covering many of these villages. The company says that there is a lot of demand for content
or entertainment in media-dark villages and mobile phones have become their only route to that
world.
Through KKT, the company knows who is listening to the programmes, unlike radio. Since
mobile phones yield data about consumer habits, it has also been collecting a vast amount of data
on rural consumers—data that does not exist or is hard to access. It gathers data and develops rich
profiles of its listeners and plans to use them to prepare customized strategies for its brands. HUL
has stopped advertising on radio in Bihar, because its own channel reaches more people than any
radio stations. The company has printed the phone number for the channel on some of its product
packs and has put up banners outside stores to increase its reach.

The ad for Kan Khajura Tesan

Source: http://www.kankhajuratesan.com/
 KKT has acquired more than 35 million subscribers across the country since its launch. The
company is able to interact with about one lakh consumers every day, which means about 25,000
hours of engagement daily with consumers in Bihar. After its success in Bihar, HUL launched this
service in other states.
KKT was piloted in Bihar in 2013. It was developed from a ‘missed call’ campaign that HUL
conducted for Wheel in 2012, in which through an advertisement on All India Radio in Uttar
Pradesh and Bihar it was asked to the listeners to give a missed call from their mobile phones to a
particular number. When they did so, they promptly got a call back with a recording of actor
Salman Khan’s dialogues from his blockbuster film Ek Tha Tiger and his endorsement of Wheel.
HUL got 16 million missed calls in four months and, by the end of the campaign, brand awareness
scores for Wheel had increased by 25 per cent and its sales jumped three times in the region.
HUL has roped in several third-party firms to generate content and services for the channel,
which it had initially named ‘Mobile Vani’ before opting for a more colloquial name.
HUL monitors usage of KKT on a ‘live dashboard’ that highlights the districts from where
traffic is coming. It can identify the areas and the times of maximum traffic. The company is also
able to access other useful information such as the frequency of the calls, the time of day the calls
come in, the numbers from which repeat calls are made and, perhaps most importantly, the exact
point when the caller decides to hang up. The dashboard also shows the number of ad impressions
for different brands.

Questions for discussion:

1. How can companies get over the lack of channels and devise innovative communication
programmes to reach villages? What channels of communication are available and what
are their advantages?
2. Imagine you work for an FMCG manufacturer, how can you use social media to promote
your products? Is it a feasible medium to reach rural consumers?