Friday, January 11, 2013

What some called a seat-of-the-pants strategy

arun sarin pulled off what some called a seat-of-the-pants strategy, when he entered india as a suspected knee-jerk reaction to vodafone’s japanese exit. b&e does a run-on with current vodafone head of marketing, cmo harit nagpal on the whys and more...

Did they just flow with the tune and let things happen or did Vodafone India actually undertake this Blue Ocean variant knowingly? Didn’t the earlier presence of Hutch, a Whampoa group concern (Singapore/Taiwan) cause a huge culture collision in the taken over entity? On the contrary, as Harit Nagpal, the Chief Marketing Officer, Vodafone Essar Ltd, says to us, “The advantage with Hutch was that it already had good practices, right kind of people and a healthy customer base, and all that has been enhanced many folds under Vodafone’s umbrella.” Deepak Kaistha, Consulting Partner, Planman HR, who has interacted closely with the top management of the company on the HR front since Hutch times, tells us, “They achieved that by ensuring that the takeover was not in the face of employees. You wouldn’t have ever heard of any layoffs or huge employee restructuring plans, even during the economic slowdown.”

But we have to accept that if not strategic pricing (where Vodafone has repeatedly failed to differentiate itself from Airtel), one area that, on a post hoc analysis, has ‘all that ends well...’ written all over it is the transition from the ‘Hutch’ brand to Vodafone in the customer’s minds. “Vodafone was already a known brand in India and rather than being a challenge for the company it worked in the favour of the company,” says Harit. However, the transition was not as seamless as Harit puts it. In the years that Hutch was Hutch, it had very sincerely worked towards creating a strong brand perception and was hugely popular amongst the youth of the country. Vodafone to its credit used tactful advertising and instead of doing what the colloquial b-stream calls the Thums Up strategy (Coke initially tried to destroy the hugely popular Thums Up brand, which, much to its discomfort, just refused to die as customers kept demanding), pulled off the SBC houdini (When SBC took over AT&T, instead of changing AT&T’s name to SBC, they changed SBC’s name to AT&T recognising the huge brand potential brand AT&T had). Thus, despite gadzillions of Zoozoos walking all up your screen and modesty, the pug refuses – cleverly – to be left out of positioning. Vodafone says it’s today even a bigger brand than was Hutch! A claim that is used to point us to the fact from the time of acquisition to now, Vodafone had displaced the state run telecom player BSNL from its third rank. Well, BSNL who?


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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