Vodafone & Technology In Developing Their Advertising Strategy

MIS 101 , SECTION -05 INSTRUCTOR MR. MAHMUD ZUBAYER April 18 , 2011

Name-

Syed Asif Iqbal Hosain Md. Saiful Haque Farhana Tasnim Md. Mehedi Hasan

ID 2009-2-55-00 ID 2009-2-55-036 ID 2009-2-55-028 ID-2010-3-10-104

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We are extremely thankful to Mr. Mahmud Zubayer, faculty at East West University,Bangladesh who has given us this opportunity to undertake this project. We are also highly grateful to Dr. Mahbubunnabi Tamal, faculty (ECE Department) at East West University, Bangladesh for giving us valuable time from his hectic schedule and provide us with very useful technical information and insights regarding Vodafone Essar and its technologycal approach to advertising. We are also thankful to our parents who were a constant source of inspiration to us.We are thankful to all our friends who gave their remarkable contributions and thanks to the almighty God.

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Table Of Contents

Title
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT INTRODUCTION METHODOLOGY SWOT ANALYSIS PERCEPTIONS OF TECHNOLOGY BASED ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN FUTURE STRATEGIES Marketing Strategies: Growth Stage SCOPE OF FUTURE GROWTH OF TECHNOLOGY BASED ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN RECOMMENDATIONS CONCLUSION REFERENCES

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Vodafone & Technology In Developing Their

Advertising Strategy
INTRODUCTION
Advertising is a non-personal form of promotion that is delivered through selected media outlets that, below most circumstances , require the marketer to pay for message residency. Advertising has long been viewed as a method of mass promotion in that a single message can reach a large number of people. But, this mass promotion approach presents problems since many exposed to an advertising message may not be within the marketers target market, and thus, may be an inefficient use of promotional funds. But, this is changing as new advertising technologies and the emergence of new media outlets offer more options for targeted advertising. Modern advertising is basically based on information technology which is hugely used by todays companies.Such a company is Vodafone Essar India.Vodafone Essar is an Indian subsidiary of Vodafone group and commenced its operations in 1994 when its predecessor Hutchison Telecom acquired the cellular license for Mumbai. The company now has operations across the country with over 78.68 million GSM mobile customers. Over the years, Vodafone Essar, has been named the Most Respected Telecom Company, the Best Mobile Service in the country and the Most Creative and Most Effective Advertiser of the Year. Vodafone is the worlds leading international mobile communications group with approximately 315 million proportionate customers as on 30 June 2009. Vodafone acquired an indirect controlling interest in Vodafone Essar, their local operating company in India, in 2007-08. Vodafone currently has equity interests in 31 countries across five continents and around 40 partner networks worldwide.

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METHODOLOGY

Primary Sources: For the study we used some recognised reports as primary data . Some of them are the GITR(Global Information Technology Report) ,GCR(Global Competitiveness Report) from the World Economic Forum .Unfortunately we weren't able to get any other first hand information like interviews. Secondary Sources: As the secondary sources we used many renowned websites and books to get as much information as possible . We were careful about the authenticity of data by constantly comparing them with each other . Limitations Of The Study: As the study process lacks enough primary sources and based basically on the secondary sources the reflection of it is clearly visible . Although there was no lack of effort from us we were not able to provide any interview from the officials of Vodafone Essar India due to our limitations .

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SWOT analysis:

Strengths
Strong international presence and brand recognition Well-defined cost reduction initiatives and managed outsourcing

Stable operating profit

The India operations are backed by its huge expertise and diversified geographical

portfolio. Sharing of network infrastructure Leading presence in India Brand value built by delivering a superior, consistent and differentiated customer experience.

Vodafones customer strategy endeavours to ensure that customers needs are at the core of all products and services.

Weakness
Benefits of investment in technology are not realized Little penetration in rural market Have not entered broadband services, smart phones segment Advertising campaigns do not have the emotional connect to the lower income

classes and rural customers

Perception of customers in lower segment that Vodafone is a costly brand

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Opportunities Focus on capturing rural sector through cost reductions improving returns Research and development of new mobile technologies
Mobile Broadband Improve accessibility to wide range of customers

Vodafone can offer voice, messaging, data and fixed broadband services through multiple solutions and supporting technologies to deliver on its total communications strategy. The advancements in 3G networks and download speeds, handset capabilities and the mobilisation of internet services, could contribut to an acceleration of data services usage growth. Threats
Existing competitive market Entry of many new players in immediate future Government regulations

Change in technology
Change in consumer preference Adverse macroeconomic conditions like recession and economic slow down

non-supply of equipment and support services by a major supplier emergencies like war, terrorism, natural calamity etc.

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PERCEPTIONS OF TECHNOLOGY BASED ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN

MANAGEMENT PERCEPTIONS: Performance management eliminates the performance appraisal or annual review and evaluation as the focus and concentrates instead on the entire spectrum of performance management and Managers site performance appraisals or annual reviews as one of their most disliked tasks. improvement strategies. These include employee performance improvement, performance development, training, cross-training, challenging assignments, 360 degree feedback and regular performance feedback. Managing employee performance every day is the key to an effective performance management system. Setting goals, making sure your expectations are clear, and providing frequent feedback help people perform most effectively. Learn more about managing performance.

EMPLOYEE PERCEPTIONS: Employee management is your first concern if you are a supervisor or manager at work. Effective management and leadership of employees allow you to accomplish your goals at work. Effective employee management and leadership allow you to capitalize on the strengths of other employees and their ability to contribute to the accomplishment of work goals. Successful employee management and leadership promote employee engagement, employee motivation, employee development, and employee retention. How you welcome a new employee into your organization is critical. Your employee orientation or onboarding process forms the foundation for a lasting, successful employment relationship. Effective ongoing training and development, whether in the classroom or onthe-job, ensures employee success in their current role. Effective employee training and development guarantees that you have employees ready for their next promotion or lateral move. Your succession planning for each position depends on training and development.

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GOVERNMENT PERCEPTIONS: The policy document, upholding the commitment of Government to resolve the prevailing shortcomings, outlines the objectives, both in strategies quality and and other related quantity and aspects the use of of telecommunications. The policy is formulated to ensure the orderly and rapid growth of telecommunications services, telecommunications technology in order to support the socioeconomic development , in line with the national aspirations . The objectives of the National Telecommunications policy , inter alia, include.

Exchange of Information : The freedom for exchange of information is recognized as an important element of human rights and efforts are to be made to provide people with greater access to all informations except the ones that are considered harmful to the society, prejudicial to national interest and security. Promotion of National Integration: Telecommunications are to promote national integration and to safeguard the social and cultural fabric of the nation by directing the expected influence of the technology towards the greater benefit of the society. Universal Access: Access to and delivery of a full range of modern, sophisticated, efficient and cost effective services of both basic1 as well as value added2 telecommunications are to be provided to as many people as is economically and socially justifiable to ensure universal access3. Digitalization: Replace of all analogue switching equipment by the year 2002 and analogue transmission equipment by 2005. This will improve existing and potential telecommunications service for both basic and value added services. In addition to improving the quality and reliability of the telecommunications infrastructure, full digitalization will facilitate a quicker and easier interface mechanism for all private and public operators.

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Competitive Framework: Creation of an environment of competition in the field of telecommunications enhancing rapid development in volume, efficiency and accessibility , shall be ensured to make telecom services available within the affordable limit of the general users.

Access to New Technology : Research and development activities to facilitate the absorption of new technology and to upgrade the facilities and services in telecommunications are to be encouraged and the regional cooperation in telecommunication sector is to be enhanced through common development and operational strategies and network standards Continuous updating of information on new and latest technology and transfer of the same for the benefit of the users,shall be encouraged. Private Sector Investment: The Government will achieve a more vigorous development through intensified private sector participation ,encouraged by the enabling environment created by the Government; a more proactive telecommunications industry responsive to users needs and creation of an environment with healthier competition & more significant multi-operator participation, all of which accelerate the reality of universal service. By opening the telecommunications sector to competition and consolidating an independent regulatory board reporting directly to the Government, private sector investment, both domestic and foreign, is encouraged. This tenet will improve access to and quality of both basic and value-added services which historically, have been monopolistic. Investment is encouraged through BLT, BOO, BOT, BTO and other joint venture schemes which, by greatly increasing the capacity ,quality and type of services, will create greately improved efficiency.

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Customer perception: Vodafone is known for its unique advertisement campaign such as pug, happy to help service and latest released Zoozoo advertisement campaign. The Zoozoo's advertisements were created in South Africa by Ogilvy & Mather, an international advertising, marketing, and public relations agency and Nirvana Films (Bangalore base company) used some animated characters to make these advertisements. It became so famous at little time that they made 30 advertisements base on Zoozoo. They spent near Rs. 30 million to make these advertisements. Now a days it is one of the most admirable advertisements in India. For example ,The official fan page of Vodafone Zoozoo campaign on Facebook has so far attracted over 200,000 fans. And this fan page is increasing rapidly (Neo@Ogilvy), the digital arm of O&M, which is managing the Zoozoo Facebook brand page, claims that the official fan page on the social networking site has received 2.6 million page views till date, since its launch on April 20, 2010. By studying the below cases it will be more clearify about the customer responses.. When we asked how many time in a day you watch the Zoozoo advertisement, we got positive response from them. They told at least 8-10 times in a day especially at night time when IPL matches were going on. As we know people are passionate about cricket in India so we found that their strategy was to target those people who like cricket and by cricket they reached out a vast number of people. They released thirty different advertisements during IPL-2 and they had contract with Sat-Max to show advertisement up to 300 seconds in a day in-between an IPL match and they paid 2 lakh Rs. Per minute and 12 lakh Rs. per minute during final match. Vodafone also was the one of the biggest sponsors of IPL-2. They promoted their service and made positive brand image between people. So, consider these all points, we can say that Vodafone used effective advertisement strategy.

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FUTURE STRATEGIES

Factors and Trends Relevant for Future Policy Initiatives Based on global trends and Indian experience, the rate of growth of cellular mobile

services would continue to be higher for a number of years. Its two important implications are further lowering of average cost per line and cellular mobile/WLL-M becoming a major tool of expansion in rural areas. The capital requirement for investments in the next five years are expected to be

lower than the present cost due to continuing decline in equipment cost as well as lower network costs due to competition resulting from entry of infrastructure providers Railways, Power Grid Corporation, etc. and huge capacity addition by other players. A small portion of the subscriber base provides a large share of call revenue.

High revenue subscriber category would form the core of competition among operators which may lead to a fall in the tariffs applicable to this type i.e. long distance calls. As a result, long distance tariffs may be even lower than those specified by the regulator. Margin of surplus will decline over time due to competition. However, the break-

even revenue per subscriber will also be lower due to decline in costs. Data services are expected to grow much faster than voice telephony. This underlines

the need in due course to focus on broad-band linkages to enable the provision of these services at the required rate. Due to large uncovered areas in rural and remote regions of the country which are

also expected to be low paying is going to bring the next revolution in the telecom sector. The trend towards convergence of services may lead to major changes in the structure of industry and markets.

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Marketing Strategies: Growth Stage

Rapid increase in sales if product has acceptance:

The current perception of Vodafone in india is that of a brand that provides high quality customer service at reasonable prices. Even though Vodafone has not hired a known face to endorse itself, it has still managed to establish a very high emotional connect with its customers through its brilliantly conceived marketing strategies. Excellent examples of this would be the recent Zoozoo campaign and the well received Vodafone Pug campaign. In the case of the Pug campaign, Vodafone managed to project itself as a service provider which would always be following the customer through the tagline Wherever you go, our network follows.. And in the case of the Zoozoo campaign, Vodafone further strengthened their image among their customer base and the market in general.
New competition enters as opportunity presents itself:

Vodafone currently faces stiff competition since new players have also entered the fray recently. Players like Loop, Hash10, MTS etc are set to roll out their services due to which Vodafone may find it difficult to maintain its current share of customer base in india. Expansion, further focusing on its current segments, implementation of a revised business model and intensive marketing would be the key features Vodafone should be concentrating on in order to retain its current position in india.
Introduce new product features:

Vodafone is currently in the process of adding further verticals to its market portfolio in order to increase its presence and expand its customer base. 3G services are currently in the pipeline. Also Vodafone can venture into providing broadband and WiMAX services which have a very high potential for revenue generation. M2M or Machine to Machine platform is also present on Vodafones strategy for market diversification. The platform, which is an enterprise solution designed by Vodafone for providing automation and wireless controlling is still under the process of patenting. But once patented, it can be a key factor in vodafones enterprise market expansion.
Expand distribution:

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The current distribution model of Vodafone has been very successful in penetration of the urban segment. It has a presence in all the 23 Indian telecom circles and has set up 78,000 base stations spread across India. And Vodafone is still deploying 2,600 base stations each month. Even in Mumbai, Vodafone has a total of 25,000 distribution outlets, out of which 35 are Vodafone Stores. Even though the presence is considerable, Vodafone needs to focus on a more intensive distributional model in order to keep up with competitors like Airtel etc.

SCOPE OF FUTURE GROWTH OF TECHNOLOGY BASED ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN There are different types of advertising and advertising techniques that are available for promoting products and services. However, here are some of the latest and hottest trends in advertising that are gaining popularity. People are now looking for new types of advertising appeals. Many of the new-age advertising methods are a result of the advent of the Internet, while some of the trends are just novel ideas that have transformed mundane advertising media into brilliant and witty advertising methods! Internet advertising is a vast concept and it entails several sub-types, many of which are only recently introduced. Email advertising is one of the earlier trends, while the new ones include banner advertising, pixel advertising, blog advertising, keyword advertising and contextual advertising. Web Banner Advertising If billboard advertising is used on roads, then a similar type called banner advertising is used on the web! Can be noticed as the horizontal advertisement strips that are seen at the top of the web page? Web banners are usually constructed using images, or JavaScript, or any other multimedia objects and animations. Web banners are usually link to web pages that are related to the content on the existing website. Surrogate Advertising Several national laws have banned the advertising of products like alcohol or cigarettes. Owing to this, many umbrella brands have come up with an advertising technique which

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only promotes the umbrella brand name which of course, also reminds the consumer of the products that have been banned from advertising. For example, Kingfisher doesnt need to advertise its beer when the general brand name, also conferred to the aircrafts, are being advertised publicly. Pixel Advertising Pixel advertising is a new type of Internet advertising in which the cost of an advertisement is calculated based on the number of pixels it occupies. This form of advertising originated in late 2005, when a British student Alex Tew came up with a website called The Million Dollar Homepage, where the advertisers could buy advertising space at the rate of $1 USD per pixel with a space limit of one million pixels. In addition to the space options provided by the hosting websites, there is also the option of using Do-it-Yourself (DIY) pixel scripts, which ensures that people who do not understand the intricacies of the pixel ads can incorporate the pixel ads in their website without any hassles. Some of the commonly used DIY pixel scripts are Million Pixel Script and the GPix Pixel Ad Script. Contextual Advertising Do you notice how Google generates ads that are relevant to your search? Or more recently, have you noticed the Google ads that show up next to your emails in the Google mail service? Well, if you are one of those people who still havent noticed this, then you need to wake up and smell the coffee. Well, Google Adsense was the first contextual advertising venture. Contextual advertising is a very specifically targeted form of Internet marketing in which the advertisements are selected by automated systems based on the content being viewed by a particular user. The automated system scans the text of a website for keywords and sends advertisements that match the content which the user is viewing. Many search engines also make use of contextual advertising for displaying ads on the search result pages, such that the ads match the things that the user is looking up on the web. After Google started this trend, there were many others like Yahoo and Microsoft who followed suit.

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Keyword Advertising Commonly, keyword advertising is also known as pay per click advertising or cost per action advertising. Although, Yahoo was the first company to venture into keyword advertising, it is Google Adwords program which is now most popular for its keyword advertising. Some of the popular search engines, which are into keyword advertising, include Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, Miva and LookSmart. Blog Advertising If you thought that a blog was nothing, but an online journal, then you are wrong. Owing to the tremendous popularity of blogs, advertisers have wisely used the blogs as effective advertising and marketing tools. The corporate blogs are excellent ways for companies to reach out to their customer base on the Internet. The advertising blogs often make use of search engine marketing techniques, which ensure better results on the web. Bathroom Advertising Truly out-of-the-box isnt it? Yes, bathroom advertising is nothing, but placement of advertisements in public restrooms! A research was carried out, in which a test group of people visiting a restroom were questioned whether they noticed the advertisements in there, and surprisingly a major percentage of the group were seen to have a high retention of the advertisements. This led to the conclusion that people visiting the restroom are a good target audience. Bathroom advertising is soon catching up as an effective advertising tool. Mobile Advertising Yes, as annoying as it might be for you to receive advertisements on your cell phone, it is now a fact that mobile advertising or cell phone advertising is one of the most effective ways of advertising. Most of the times, advertisers have a data of mobile numbers of their

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existing customer base as well as a list of phone numbers of people who might be potential customers. A message on the mobile phone rarely goes unnoticed and hence, qualifies as an effective marketing or advertising tool! Public Relations Advertising Maintaining and developing good public relations has been a marketing tool for companies to maintain goodwill amongst employees as well as clients. It is not only a way to be in the public eye, but also a great way to build and maintain a particular brand image and identity. Public relations is thus a great advertising tool which is used by companies to reach out to their investors, employees and of course, their existing and potential customer base.

Recommendations of The Study Vodafone Essar India is a technology based company ,naturally their advertising campaign is also based on technology.Their ideas about effective and efficiant advertising is clear by their approach. Their Pug & Zoo Zoo is one of the most successful brand ambassador of the telecom brand campaign .Where others using high profile superstars they are using simple but effective icons and successful a lot more than others . But they should find some more better ways to communicate with the people to continue this joyful journey.And also there are some problem to get mixed into the rural areas with this kind of advertising beacause of this peoples lack of education.To get easy access to them the marketing and advertising heads need to think more creative just to be as simple so the mass people can hear the company's voice. This can be more based on technology ,because this is what,that makes things easy to learn. As for Bangladesh's telecom sectors perspective the advertising should be more informative not melodramatic ( singing and dancing) . They can learn from Vodafone that without any prominent faces Ads can be massively successful and the information can be conveyed.

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CONCLUSION In the highly compititive global market of today the companies are needed to have the latest advertising tool to convey the massage to the mass people . This tool is none other than technology. Technology has truly changed the complexion of the advertising world . Being one single step ahead in the technologycal sector can make the difference which matters the most.Therefore we should focus a lot more on effective and efficiant advrtising based on technology which can save the money and reach to the unreached heights.

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REFERENCES Global Information Technology Report 2011 Global Competitiveness Report 2011

www. vodafone .in www. trai.gov.in www.google.com en. wikipedia.org www. essar.com / telecom www. coai. com wireless federation.com telecomtalk.info
www.vodafone.com

telecomindiaonline.com www.bestof indya.com

www.afaqs.com Marketing Management- A South Asian Perspective-13th edition- Philip

Kotler, Mithileshwar Jha, Abrahim Koshy, Kevin Keller.

Standardization In Telecommunication-Bangladesh Perspective .

www.scribd.com