Pay Per Second Campaign

It positioned Tata DOCOMO as a refreshingly different and innovative brand and generated sales momentum that has made it the fastest growing telecom service providers in the India.

Background

India is one of the world’s fastest growing telecom markets with nearly 500 million subscribers and is also one of the most competitive with more than 10 telecom operators and the lowest tariffs in the world.

Tata DOCOMO is the GSM brand of TATA Teleservices in which NTT DOCOMO (the largest telecom operator in Japan and one of the technologically most advanced operators in the world) has a strategic investment.

Tata DOCOMO was entering the fast saturating telecom market late and at a point of time when leading GSM operators were well-entrenched with strong market and brand presence.

Tata DOCOMO was the 8th entrant in a market in which consumers perceived mobile operators as all the same. A market that was saturated with 'telecom' offers and cluttered with hoardings and adverts, everywhere and in your face. A market that felt commoditised, not personal.

Tata DOCOMO understood that in the modern day environment where consumers are used to expressing themselves through their choice of brand, they are frustrated by the sameness of the telecom operators. The feeling is that the operators do not empathize that the phone is a big part of their life and not a gadget or thing. They feel treated as a number, a brick in the wall, trapped and exploited by the operators.

The strategy - Pay per second

When Tata DOCOMO entered the market all operators was charging consumers ‘on a per-minute pulse’ with average tariffs around Rs. 1 per minute for local calls and Rs. 1.50 per minute for long distance calls.

Tata DOCOMO thus introduced the revolutionary concept of ‘pay-per-use’, in which the consumer had to pay only for the seconds that he talked and ‘not pay for the unused’ that he had to in a typical minute pulse.

The concept had its genesis in the Tata values of honesty, integrity and customer first and was an attempt to liberate the consumer from the ‘telecom clutter-land’ of confusing tariffs that fleeced them by making them pay even for the unused.

The concept of a per second pulse was unheard of in India and needed a strong communication to establish the honest “pay for what you use” positioning as the best telecom offering.

The campaign – Why can’t your mobile operator count in seconds?

The communication challenge was at three levels.

• First, as a new entrant Tata DOCOMO had to create enough salience in the market to catch the attention of the target group.
• Second, it had to establish why a ‘per second pulse’ was in supreme consumer interest.
• Lastly, it needed to establish that the existing telecom operators were fleecing the consumers and sow the seed of dissonance and drive switching.

Campaign Execution

Tata DOCOMO wants to be a brand that has a special emotional connect with its customers. The brand wants to appeal to the customer not as a mobile operator but as a brand. A brand that is refreshingly different and liberating in its approach, does everything different from the way other mobile operators, offers the opportunity to the consumer to express their identity through their choice of brand.

The campaign wanted to carry forward this refreshingly different, maverick brand personality with hint of cheekiness to grab consumer attention to its proposition, without talking down to him

A Savings calculator was created that allowed consumers to enter their calling details and see how much they could have saved to date if their operator had charged them in seconds instead of minutes.

Using probability theory (Bernoilli's Theorem of large numbers) and a robust formula the savings calculator became the landing property of the campaign (http://www.tatadocomo.com/the-second-effect.aspx). This was Christened “The Second Effect” to make a cheeky reference to the impact counting in seconds could do.

The campaign was supported by a small budget of $75,000 and was executed over a 15 day period across the Google ad network as well as leading Indian publishers like Yahoo, Rediff.com, MSN, Facebook, Orkut, Youtube etc. (targeting the 15-24 TG)

The ads were cheeky and stark in line with the brand essence of questioning paradigms.

They asked a simple question “Why does your mobile operator not count in seconds?” The options provided were hilarious e,g,. He flunked in maths, he thinks you flunked in maths. The communication then asked him to check out the real reason why operators were not counting in seconds by visiting the Second Effect site (subtle hint that their current operators were cheating them by making them pay for all the unused seconds).

You can view the creatives below:

The destination page of the campaign can be viewed here - http://bit.ly/7LvPQ

In all more than 1 million people visited the page and the collective savings for these people were Rs. 3.71 billion ($ 82 million).

The effect of the Pay Per Second campaign

The campaign changed the face of Indian telecom forever. Tata DOCOMO went from start-up to ‘double-digit million’ subscribers in 3 months and has since become the number one net subscriber adder month after month (http://bit.ly/7bVO7R ).

The campaign generated tremendous consumer response and even precipitated reaction from the regulator (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) which suggested that all telecom operators should introduce a per second plan in consumer interest. (http://in.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idINIndia-42941720091006 & http://bit.ly/75JREl & many more articles across media on this http://bit.ly/6bMDf2 ). These incumbent operators opposed it tooth and nail.

However, by then, so strong was the word of mouth and understanding of pay-per-use with the consumers that the incumbent operators had no choice but to offer the per second billing to consumers to stem their falling market share.

By October 2009, just one month after the campaign all telecom operators were forced to launch the per second pulse. The Indian consumer was the ultimate winners with their mobile bills coming down substantially across the board, saving all users around $2.4 billion a month.

Tata DOCOMO riding on the pay per second campaign established itself as a refreshingly different, honest and maverick brand that will bring-in pro-consumer innovations. The per-second pulse campaign is seen as a path-breaking communication that successfully questioned an existing paradigm and in the process created one of the hottest and fastest growing brands in India today.