Mobile Marketing
Background
Mobile phones have revolutionized the world of communication over the last couple of decades. In India, mobile phones have been rapidly adopted, across pop-strata and income groups. Not only are mobile phones reducing information asymmetry in our day-to-day businesses, but are also the window to the world for those in remote locations and aspiring for an improved lifestyle.
From a marketing and media point of view, mobile phones provide an incredible opportunity. In India, where all mass media put together can only reach under 75% of all individuals (the figure is even lower in Rural India), and television penetration is likely to be even lower, mobile can be the answer. The fact of the matter is that there are almost 200mn people with access to mobile phones but no access to television.
Impact of Mobile on Marketing
Mobile is changing and reshaping all our assumptions and approaches to marketing.
In the past, the basic frame of reference in marketing was relatively simple - How many people be reached through our media plans. However, in a scenario where over
800mn people have access to mobile phones – a rework is needed in the existing frame of reference. The new question to be answered is - How can we leverage this personal medium to reach out to our consumers in a customized and relevant manner.
Today, HUL connects with over 40mn consumers on mobile, in various ways, including
Kan Khajura Tesan (Refer appendix on KKT). On KKT itself, consumers who are starved of entertainment, especially in rural India, love to keep on accessing the service. Similarly, multiple mobile-couponing campaigns (Refer Appendix on
Couponing) have also been run, and the response from the consumers has been humungous. Both these platforms, however, scratch the surface of the opportunity on mobile.
Neither of them intrinsically are a customized offering for every individual. Instead, it is a mass offering with a way for interested individuals to reach out directly to the service. The Brief
The brief is to create the next wave of mobile led marketing ideas which aid consumer access to our brand messaging, while delivering meaningful/entertaining content to them in an engaging fashion. This could be either a brand-led idea or a brand-agnostic idea, but it must engage with our consumers in such a way that they are interested in the offering - while seeing or listening to or interacting with our branded messaging.
The target group for this would be the mass consumer who is beginning to get more savvy on mobile (so is willing to experiment, has a smart-phone perhaps but is unlikely to do much with either SMS or data - may have very little or no data usage). She would have access to other media like TV or FM, and therefore is not entertainment starved, but is hungry for something more.
Linking up the offering with purchase would be useful, but not necessarily essential.
The idea(s) will be evaluated on the basis of the following criteria:
1. Scale – how many people are we likely to reach with an activity
2. Affinity – of the idea with the mass consumer described above
3. Cost – what would be the end to end cost (per contact) of doing this activity, and how does that benchmark versus other forms of traditional media (Refer
Appendix for benchmark costs)
4. Engagement – how well the idea will engage the target-group while having the ability to land a brand message

Appendix
About Kan Khajura Tesan
While the world is connected and spoilt with an overload of entertainment through regular media and digital mediums, there are parts of the world that are totally in the dark and disconnected from the world.
Many parts of India are still media dark regions. Most of rural India lives in darkness due to lack of television or print or radio at home, hence ‘Media dark’. Even in households where TV is present, there are electricity cuts for 8-10 hours every single

day, rendering TVs useless. For people living in these areas there are limited options of entertainment.
However, these consumers are still significant (more than 200 million) contributors to the sales of FMCG brands. In addition, they also happen to be key growth markets for
Unilever brands. Reaching out to these consumers with our brand communication and offering remains a big challenge.
Our answer lay in the only electronic equipment the people here keep turned on- a rudimentary mobile phone. And 850 million people in India have a mobile phone.
This gave birth to the idea of integrating one of the oldest mediums of entertainment
- the radio, with the most used device today - the mobile phone. So we transformed their basic phones, to give them something they didn’t have - a free entertainment channel - THE KAN KHAJURA TESAN – an on-demand, entertainment channel that worked on any mobile.
To access the content, all that the consumer needed to do was give a “Missed call”
(the call gets disconnected automatically after two rings) on 1800-30-000-123. He is then called back where entertaining content - an RJ speak, jokes, and Bollywood songs amongst others are played out. This meant, giving an entertainment hungry audience exactly what they wanted, in an on-demand, free and always-on fashion.
We had to come up with an idea that was so inspiring, to generate pull amongst people and make them call us. Areas that were otherwise termed to be ‘media dark’ are now
“entertainment-enlightened” with ‘Kan Khajura Tesan’. Currently, it reaches out to more than 37 million subscribers. Till date we have had more than 1 billion minutes of engagement with our consumers. Our ads have been heard close to 500 million times. For the first 6 months Kan Khajura Tesan was present in two states of Bihar and
Jharkhand and now, given the success, we have extended it to other parts of the country giving every Indian with a mobile phone access to entertainment they crave for. About Couponing Offers
Couponing is the issuance of coupons or vouchers offering discounts to consumers on purchase of a product. Just to give a flavor, coupons could be from – free talk time recharges of varying denominations to free movie ticket vouchers. Vouchers or coupons can be obtained across a number of verticals – e-commerce shopping, fine dining, travel, off line shopping etc.
Currently in HUL, couponing has been pre dominantly done on free talk time. Several million consumers have participated in the various couponing activities we have done across numerous brands and categories. Our consumers have found the offer to be exciting as well as innovative. Also, there is a lot of consumer delight as 95% of the subscribers in India are pre-paid users and any talk time related offer is as valuable as hard currency.
Couponing can be leveraged through mobile in a few simple steps –
a) A unique code is printed inside every stock keeping unit (SKU) and the SKU packaging will have a mobile number printed on it
b) Consumers will be asked to either SMS the unique code or give a missed call on the mobile number. In case of the latter, the consumer is called back and is prompted by the interactive voice response to enter the unique code
c) On validating the code, promised gratification is delivered to the consumer
Couponing gives us a chance to have 2-way conversation with our consumers through interactive voice response led Q&A. This can be used to capture relevant information from the consumers. Mobile presents us an exciting platform to reach out to consumers at a later date through personalized relevant content. Innovative offers and coupons can be tailored as per the target group.

Indicative Costs of Traditional Media Vehicles (per household)
Media Costs
TV: Re 1-2/HH (These are marginal costs over a typical media plan. Avg. cost approx.
Rs. 0.3/HH)
Print: Rs. 3/HH
Radio: Rs. 4/HH
KKT: Rs. 2-3/HH
Other Costs
Cost of Airtime on Telco: Approx. Re. 1/min
Assumptions on infrastructure and content costs can be made appropriately
(Note: These are approximate and have been adjusted for the purpose of this case)