Pakistani Telecom World (Part2):Brand Portfolio

Pakistan's 5 major telecom(GSM) brands have very unique branding structures. The main reason can be attributed to the unique evolution phases that the brands and the industry has gone through. From a player sitting on the ranks from 1994 to a new entrant in 2007, many players who are now competing for the same consumer have had dramatically different histories attached to them.

The Pakistan telecom branding has always been a bandwagon and there are phases in this evolution where every player is trying to ride the same bandwagon. So there was a time not many few years ago when launching new sub-brands was the order of the day. every new consumer segment had a brand of their own. One can judge how bad things had become that by end of 2007 Mobilink had already launched a total of 7 brands within its Jazz portfolio alone. Jazz which was already a subbrand within the mobilink portfolio had consumer segment brands like Octane and Ladies first as well as utility inspired brands like Jazz one, Jazz Easy etc. Ufone too tried to hop on to the same bandwagon but got a real scare with the launch of Public Demand. Launched under its prepaid portfolio, Ufone already had 4 other brands when the ill fated Public Demand saw the light of day. The hue and cry from all quarters of the society on its tvc brought them back to life.

The case for monolithic brand structure comes from the thought that consumers attention span is limited and the myriad of media opportunities means that it is ever more difficult to catch that limited attention. Hence in the name of efficiency, all money to be spent on media should be pushed through with a single brand message. There is already too much clutter in the consumer's world and it would only confuse the consumer even more if each of your sub brands is trying individually to catch their attention. The media efficiencies for monolithic brands is still more than the closer bond that segmented brands can create with their consumer. In the cut throat competition that the Pakistani telecom market sees, the media bucks can make or break the game. With all players having similar marketing budgets, it makes even more sense to put all your money behind the Big Brand than distribute it between smaller brands for reduced impact.

In 2000 Unilever decided to condense its brand portfolio from more than 1500 brands to 400 power brands. British American tobacco has had a similar history. They too have identified their global drive brands and consolidated/merged the smaller regional brands which required much more energy and resources to be globally feasible.

Since 2009, both Mobilink and Ufone have reverted back to their monolithic brand structures. Zong played it right from the very beginning and stuck to a single brand theory. Though it can be argued that the plethora of packages being launched has dampened the spirit of that master brand. Telenor is the only brand which has not reverted back to the monolithic brand structures of their competitors. They are still investing heavily on Persona, Djuice and Talkshawk.

The onus of marketing in a monolithic branding world lies less on the media planner and more on the brand manager. The responsibility is much more because the brand insights have to be so universally true that they touch the hearts of every consumer in the target market with a homogenous impact. In theory it might be easy to visualize insights which hit their mark their mark equally on all segments of the society but in reality coming up with such insights is a gargantuan task.

The Pakistani Telecom World(Part 1) : Branding Theory Explained

It hasn’t been a long time since I entered the telecom world. 9 months to be exact, which is more like taking your first breadth in this big bad world. But my association with the telecom world isn’t anything new. During my stay at contact plus about 3 years ago I was working behind the scenes on the brand plans for Ufone. Then at RED communications, the pitch to Warid and Afghan wireless gave me an ample insight into the world of telecom branding (or so I thought). But having spent a good part of an year in the industry itself, I have realized that it is not possible to get to grips with how branding actually works in the industry.
Having recently read through the quarterly presentation of the Brand Health Tracking report (and mind you, I’m not giving anything away here, because the whole industry subscribes to the same BHT report and the research is conducted by the same research organization so the insights revealed in the study are not much of a surprise to anyone out there) I have been told that the industry still works on the basis of awareness and consideration. In layman’s terms the emotional angle of the brand accounts for less than 30% of the influence on which the consumer makes his/her purchase decision. No wonder you see the consumer’s world totally flooded with telecom advertising because top of mind is what sells the most. How the advertising builds trust, creates a relationship with the consumer or shows how the brand brings a difference in the consumer’s life, hence, has no place in the discussions of a marketing team.
In most telecom organizations, the direction is set by the product team. In an industry where the product team leads the direction of the brand, can one can see an obvious flaw. No doubt, the industry is moving forward on the basis of technological advancements but in my opinion there is a lot of room for bringing sanity to the product portfolio. A short term dip in sales is most often than not followed up by the introduction of a new package. A certain tactical move by a competitor is followed up again, by the same strategy, maybe a lower priced version of it. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy to keep following what your competitor is doing without giving a great thought to what you can achieve in this world. It seems that even the branding strategy of the leader is made in the quarters of the competitors.
The level of differentiation in the industry is at a bare minimum. One can expect just that from an industry where almost everything is sourced out from vendors. From equipment to software, to applications only the marketing strategies of how to combine these products creatively and communicate them creatively is left at the hands of the marketing team. A case in point is the Blackberry. 4 of the 5 players in the industry provide the blackberry service and if one were to compare the product communications for all four of them, it would be difficult to find many differences. The reason being that RIM which provides the blackberry solution to all these telecom players has a stringent set of guidelines in the way blackberry is portrayed in the advertising. This is an extreme case where a vendor provides the same product to all the players and even dictates its terms in the communications as well, leaving little room for any differentiation that a telecom player would like to create.
Looking at the product innovations in the industry, there is not much to choose from. The first mover never has a long time before others jump on to the bandwagon and remove any hopes that the innovator ever had of creating a differentiated image. SMS bundles are a concept which did not take too long to catch on. Within a period of a few months almost all the players had SMS bundles. And now we are all on our way to seeing the same thing happening for Voice Bundles.
I will talk about creating differentiation in telecom world in a later article but before I end of this article, a friend working at an FMCG in Karachi, after hearing the state of branding in the telecom world, once told me that having worked in the Telecom world for an year, I should forget about ever finding my place back in the FMCG marketing world. And I think I agree with him, I have caught on to too many bad habits and started believing in way too many branding myths only seem to work(or do they?) in the telecom world :)

Note: This article was first published on my previous blog in August of 2009. Since I plan to add to this post soon, i have re-posted it here.