Marketing Brew

Base your advertising strategy on the stage of the product life-cycle. A very important lesson I learnt in my b-school days.

In a nutshell what it says is – If your product or service is relatively new in the market, you advertise its generic benefits and increase adoption. As the product progresses on its life-cycle and competition increases, your advertising should aim to differentiate your brand from the rest.  So when the world’s first camera was launched, the manufacturers would have said, ‘’hey folks, this little thingy is called a ‘camera’. It allows you to quickly take pictures of you and your family and just about anything you want. Isn’t that swell?!”. Today, when there are a number of such manufacturers, one says “hey we give you 10 megapixels with multiple face recognition technology”, another says “hey we have Bluetooth connectivity and an image stabilizer for countering camera shakes” and so on. So that’s how product life cycle affects the overall advertising strategy. Of course the need to strike that special emotional connect remains an imperative throughout this life cycle.

So what baffles me is the creative strategy Idea Cellular continues to adopt year after year. Each campaign continues to highlight the generic benefits of mobile telephony. The campaign with the under-privileged children being able to learn through wireless communication, the campaign with the Minister taking a quick public poll on an important issue through SMS, a damsel (apparently) in distress taking quick poll of her friends through SMS – all of this only manages to show what mobile technology is capable of and how it could be used in our day to day lives. Just where is this campaign doing that little bit called ‘differentiation’? You know differentiation, where you tell your consumers this is how you are different and better than the competition.

Even more amazing is that they continue with their generic advertising while competitors like Airtel and Vodafone are churning out nothing less than advertising gold. Their campaigns represent a brilliant mix of thematic and tactical advertising. So while they build the emotional connect through many of their endearing thematical ads, they also pepper their campaigns with advertisements that create the final reason to buy. 10 paise SMS, friendly customer care service, bill payment portals and so on. This is where Idea is missing out – they need more tactical ads in their campaigns to support the overall theme to complete the package and to create that one final reason to induce purchase by consumers.