So one fine day, we decided to test Ufone’s brand promise and not surprisingly, Ufone fell way short of expectations, even more so than those telecoms who don’t claim to provide good service.

Here’s what happened:

The most basic package Ufone is offering is for Rs.150 with the option to add the bells and whistles later on. In addition to that, it had launched a subdued version of mobile+connection packages that are so common in the Western market. Currently it has discontinued that package but is still offering the mobile at only Rs.1200.

The only catch: you can’t run the mobile on any other service. So you have to invariably buy an Ufone connection.

Of course you can unlock the code from one of those mobile specialists in the mobile market akin to what people do with the ones brought from abroad, but the cost of this ‘bare-minimum’ mobile from Huawei doesn’t justify going to all this trouble.

Back to the story, I bought one of these Huawei Ufone sets along with a Ufone connection for Rs.1350 from their franchise in Dhoraji. Now this was my first interaction with the Ufone people, and I was met by two sullen fellows who looked even more crestfallen to see me approach them. After buying the package, I asked the guy who was tending to me to activate the sim for me, he curtly replied that I should do it myself by calling 789 from the cell. For some reason, I put off activating the SIM at the franchise and instead tried to do it later on at home. Little did I know that this small action would lead to tortuorous consequences later on.

Now their activation procedure requires you to confirm your CNIC number although you have already submitted a copy of the original CNIC as well as shown the original one to the customer rep.  Calling that 789 number is an ordeal in itself. I called five times the first time before I got through to a CSR.

When I gave my CNIC details, the guy at the other end told me that I need to take my original CNIC to one of their customer service centers for verification as my CNIC had insufficient details. As a consumer, this didn’t amuse at all as I had deliberately bought the connection from an obscure franchise to avoid the hassle of a company-owned customer service centre which is always flooded with people, especially that of Ufone.

So, I asked the guy who had dropped the bombshell on me that why should I again go and show my CNIC when I had already done that. If I hadn’t shown my original CNIC, how the heck did I get the connection in the first place?

The poor chap had no answer to my demands, he just kept repeating the same line which he had delivered previously parrot style albeit with rising crescendo, showing that he was getting angry himself. Seeing that I was getting nowhere, I hung up.

I then tried calling the number again in the hope that maybe that rep was a newbie and didn’t know what was wrong and maybe this time I would be able to get in touch with an experienced one. So I called after two hours.

This time I couldn’t get through even after five tries. Tried the next day at 7am in the morning, 12.30 pm, 2.15 pm, 4.30 pm and finally at 5.50 pm when I finally got through for the second time.

All in all it had taken a whopping 17 tries to get in touch with a rep. Then just as I was telling my CNIC no. to the guy, the line dropped.

Can you believe that? The line dropped when I had finally struck gold after 17 tries!

In utter dismay I tried one more time, and this time got through on the first try. Again I gave my CNIC number but unfortunately the response was the same. Insufficient details on the CNIC data gathered from NADRA and that I had to visit the customer service centre myself with the original CNIC.

The centre closes at 6pm and since I had spent the entire day trying to reach their rep on phone, it was closing time and I had to wait another day to activate the connection.

Next day I did visit the centre at 2.30pm. My turn came at 2.50pm, majority of which time was spent standing since there wasn’t sufficient seating arrangement.

This time around I came across a feisty lady for a service rep. She wasn’t impolite or anything, it’s just that her persona didn’t match that of a customer rep. You got the feeling that one false move you made and she would have devoured you right then and there. The way she was bossing around her male colleagues, she ought to have been their team leader instead of dealing with the customers.

But the bottom-line is I got out of there unscathed with the lady finally resolving my problem after getting me to sign some more signatures along with even more thumb impressions.

I asked her why did I have to go through all this trouble, and she explained that there was some ‘fire’ at one of their centres which curtailed their ability to extract complete data for the NIC. This she said was also the reason for lack of response at the UAN number.

Whether this is true or not is not clear, but in any case the customers should have been informed of this development. Good companies even when going for unscheduled maintenance let the customers know and apologize in advance. This is the bare minimum requirement to be deemed as a good customer service provider. And Ufone is proclaiming to be the ultimate in customer service.

So what does this story tell us? Simply that the brand essence of any brand is determined by the perception in the mind of the consumer and not necessarily by what the custodians of that brand are projecting it to be. Sure that projection can become the brand essence if it is consistently effective over a long period of time. Think BMW. Think Caterpillar.  Think Dalda  Think Hamdard. It took ages for these brands to create a desired essence in the consumer’s mind.

So what’s the brand essence of Ufone? Definitely not customer service, they fail at this brand promise of theirs miserably. Only Zong fares worse at this.

The real brand essence of Ufone as perceived by the consumer is that of a youth-oriented brand that comes up with the most cost-effective and unique packages and conveys them in a humorous undertone.

You can argue that Zong has the cheapest offerings but it doesn’t. The connection fee for Ufone is Rs.150 while for Zong it is Rs.300. On top of that, Ufone is the only provider that is offering service cum mobiles in the Pakistani market and that also dirt cheap. That’s the bottom line and the consumer knows it well, hence the brand essence.

So what can Ufone do about this yawning gap? Stop projecting itself as a custodian of the perfect customer service by scrapping the ten commandments. (The funny thing is, these service commandments are not even on their website. They can only be seen at their outlets in the form of a huge poster hugging one of the walls.)

Yes it can continue to use these mantras internally to ensure that its employees don’t wander too far away from providing good service, but don’t advertise this fact.

Then raise the level of its customer service just a few notches up. It doesn’t need to compete with the likes of Telenor and Mobilink on this parameter because it’s definitely not Ufone’s forte. The thing is Ufone can get away with average customer service if it continues to hammer on its current positioning of unique and cost-effective packages. Instead of offering Blackberry packages to no use, it ought to upgrade its basic connection+mobile packages on the Western market model.

Right now it’s offering the most basic cellphone at Rs.1200. It should introduce better models, maybe even have a brand alliance with Nokia to give those mobiles along with the connection and of course free airtime.

How about a Nokia 5230 customized for Ufone and 150 free minutes for let’s say Rs.14,000?

Or how about a Samsung Corby Pro for approximately Rs. 13,000?

Consumers are increasingly being wooed by the cellphone manufacturers to embrace the touch-screen category and Ufone ought to jump on this bandwagon right away.

Throw in mobile insurance as well for good measure and you’ve set the ball rolling for a paradigm shift in the way  consumers in this part of the world buy cellphones and telecom services. And right now, Ufone is in the best position to induce this behavioral change.

No related posts.

The movie sky-rocketed to the top of the charts. Why? Did it have a plausible plot? Hardly? A riveting name? Far from it. Movies with song titles abound but very few end up making a decent sale. A star-studded cast? No.

So what was it about this movie that moved the audience so much that it topped the charts?

In a nutshell, the story is about a group of friends whose friendship lasts unscathed beyond the college days. The group is dominated by Jay aka ‘Rats’ (Imran Khan) and Aditi aka ‘Meow’ (Geledina D’Souza), two inseparable individuals who don’t think they are in love until they start going out with other people. It’s a rehashed story as easy as they come in Bollywood. There are no twists and turns and the ending is predictable even for a three-year old.

Although the Indian consumer seems to have an insatiable appetite for romantic chick flicks, many such movies bomb at the box office. And yet Jaane Tu was able to break through the clutter.

There are no hot shots to enthrall the audience apart from cameos from veterans like Naseeruddin Shah, Parish Rawal, Arbaz and Shahbaz Khan.

What gives then? It’s the infectuous and the eccentric chemistry of the Group with all its nuances and innuendos that carries the day for the movie. The direction is good, but without this particular group dynamics, the movie would have fallen flat on its face. It’s the aura permeated by the characters that they’re really having the time of my lives which rubs off on the audience, and not just the antics of the hero and the heroine.

And therein lies the lesson for any marketer looking to make its BTL activity resonate with the heartstrings of the consumer. Remember the contrasting BTL activities of Minute Maid and Zong and how Zong came out to be more successful in spite of the fact that its presentation wasn’t as immaculate as the Minute Maid’s?

The same principle was at work there. Zong had hired a number of youngsters who appeared to gel well with each other and looked to be enjoying themselves. Their positive group dynamics projected a contagious aura on the consumers loitering nearby and they were drawn towards the group to inquire what the occasion was.

In short, any brand, and I mean any brand at all can hire a bunch of youngsters, make them dorn attires according to the brand essence of the brand to be projected, and then let them loose with the strict instructions to just enjoy themselves and be pleasant to anyone who approaches them. And Viola! You’ve got a successful BTL activity.

 Of course, you need to work upon the presentation and the embedding of the brand in that particular environment, but that in reality is a secondary consideration, contrary to what the BTL pundits would have you believe.

The movie didn’t offer only this lesson in branding. There were a few others as well. For instance did you notice how Coke was neatly embedded in one of the scenes? In fact it was so brilliantly and yet subtly promoted as a viable alternative to liquor when at the end-of-college party the fat friend dejected from Meow comes to the bar and asks for Coke – on the rocks – and the bartender responds with a straight face as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do.

The element so fascinating about this scene is that most of us as kids tried to emulate the drinking phenomenon we saw in the movies using Coke as an alternative. Coke was considered the best alternative because if you pour just a pint of it in the glass, it doesn’t look its usual color of dark brown but instead gives a yellowish orange glow, just what liquor looks like on the big screen.

This is not the first time brands have tried to embed neatly into the storyline of a Bollywood movie. Bachna Ae Haseeno had the main actor Rambhir Kapoor working on the development of a video game for Microsoft. So while Hollywood have had a great run embedding brands subtly into the plot lines for decades, Bollywood is just starting to copycat the phenomena like it is used to copying the entire scripts of Hollywood flicks. Is anyone from Lollywood listening?

Related posts:

1. ZONG VS THE MINUTE MAID It may seem like the most outrageous of comparisons, Zong-...

Have you seen the new Minute Maid campaign at the Forum? What do you think?

Well, to me it appears fantastic on the face of it. The decoration and the works have been done exquisitely what with all the Minute Maid pet bottles hanging from the top in an elegant array. Then there’s the fruit cart brimming with succulent oranges that all but ensures the association between the brand and the real orange. There was also the orange tarts on another cart with a girl trying to initiate the sales by putting them in a box and stopping people to have a try( she may have been the brand manager of Minute Maid by the looks of how desperate she was to tie in tarts with her brand). The tarts looks to be smaller than your usual size with a orange slice placed on top of them and priced at Rs.30. The cart carrying the tarts looked good enough as well.

So, on the face of it, everything seemed to per perfectly aligned with the brand essence.

However, beneath the glittering veneer, there’s something amiss. The one element that would have carried this branding effort from just another campaign to a great one is enthusiasm, i.e enthusiasm of the team executing it.

Not only was the enthusiasm missing, there was an aura of unease emanating from the Minute Maid team that I’m sure would have been felt by the consumer. I as a consumer surely felt it. The team looked uncomfortable like they didn’t belong there or that it was just a chore for them and they weren’t really enjoying it.

As far as the belonging part is concerned, at the risk of sounding discriminatory, I would say they didn’t. How can you expect people belonging to middle to lower-middle class to gel in seamlessly with the public at the Forum?

This same team would have fared better, I guess at maybe Millennium Mall or Dolmen Mall of Tariq Road and Hyderi. But here they just didn’t cut it.

No doubt the poor chaps were having a hard time looking like hapless Zombies. Enjoyment was the last thing on their mind.

In contrast, the Zong team at the recently concluded and surprisingly hit International Book Fair at Karachi did a much better job. Although their set-up was mind-boggling and nowhere as good as the Minute Maid one, the team comprised of young energetic youth who looked like they were enjoying themselves which piqued the interest of the consumers loitering about enough to ask them what was the big deal?

And that takes us to the interaction part. When you’re launching a campaign that isn’t going to bedazzle the consumer with its spectacle, you need to involve the audience in the event. It’s either that or this. There’s no middle ground.

Both the Zong and the Minute Maid campaign focused on interacting with the consumer, but while Zong fared much better, the Minute Maid effort isn’t anything to write home about. But why? In spite of the fact that the Minute Maid set-up was much better than the Zong one. Again it all boils down to the choice of team members. The Zong team comprised of university grads, able to converse in our former master’s language, English. That made all the difference. However, that wasn’t the only difference.

Zong had a two-pronged strategy. While at one end they were targeting the young adults with the chance to put down graffiti on the Zong board in line with the brand mantra ‘Sub keh do’, at the other end they were catering to kids with a drawing contest, which by the look of it, was a tremendous success. The logic of targeting kids, however, was a questionable one for a telecom company. This is the target market that is not going to be using a cellphone (with the exception of filthy rich kids with filthy rich parents), so it seems to be a strategy based in the far-out future.

Coming back to the Minute Maid campaign, there was hardly any activity going on.  The entire time I was there, the only worthwhile thing to happen was an announcement to invite the public to showcase some talent of theirs and get a prize. The only one to turn up was a kid who went to recite Surah Rehman. Now this surah is quite long, and although this kid who looked to be no more than 10 years old was quite good at the recitation, it didn’t actually make for an exciting activity.

One of my friends suggested that the Minute Maid team start throwing oranges in the air and give free brand samples to those who catch it. Although this would have created a ruckus in the Forum, it shows that even my friend who’s actually a finance person and does not know much about branding realized it was dull an affair  and that something needed to be done to stir things up a little.

Easier said than done, what would I have done if I were the brand manager? Nothing drastic. Half of what she’s doing is already perfectly right, i.e. the overall ambience. The only thing I would have done is change the human factor. Hire another BTL company that can provide energetic people with a sunny disposition, and then devise a strategy with a plan A,B and C. What plan to execute would be dependent on the situation at hand.

The best way to embed your brand in the consumer’s heart is to immerse them in a pleasant if not mind-blowing experience. Verdict: Zong did it to some extent. Minute Maid missed the mark.

No related posts.