So, what’s driving adoption beyond metropolitan cities? We got some answers from the IAMAI Digital Summit at the Maurya Sheraton in New Delhi:
Rajiv Hiranandani, Co-Founder and Country Head Mobile2Win compared the urban and rural markets, and since the rural market is increasingly coming into focus for marketers, the mobile VAS industry will follow suit. India, he said, is 4 years behind China in VAS adoption. Devotional content is big in South India, and as user interface evolves, local language content is going to grow. He gave examples of campaigns that they have conducted: 40 percent SMS access is via BSNL, 60 percent from UP, Jharkhand and Bihar. Monotones are still big. Loksatta had 10,000 content downloads a day during during a marketing campaign. The demand is primarily for entertainment content. Sakal, a Marathi daily say 125,000 downloads for Christmas content they pushed in non-metro Maharashtra. Panjab Kesari saw 40,000 downloads of Lohri related content in one day with one ad – relevant and customized content. He has the following product recommendations: Voice applications, mobile radio, commodity prices, match-making applications, all for rural India, which wants simple, urban and region specific content.
Mariam Mathew, COO of Malayalam Manorama recommended a multi-pronged multimedia strategy for multiple touch points across the geography. They launched Manorama Mobile to transform passive readers and make TV, print and Radio interactive, as well as reach out to readers all day and attract the youth. The pull strategy for them is to become a platform for public expression, and push content like cricket and ringtones to users. They cross promoted their mobile content, and on one occasion, for just 2 gold coins for daily winners for a quiz, they had some people spending up to 3000 minutes; a total of 8 and a half lakh minutes of usage. Entertainment is popular. Print papers don’t cover exam results anymore, so that got a tremendous response and in fact brought down the network in the southern region. Challenges that they face: profitability due to imbalance in revenue, and implementation of price differentiation. Consumer acceptance is an issue, and users are sensitive and reluctant to make mobile payments.
Virendra Gupta, Director Telecom Services for Trilogy said that UP and Bihar contribute more VAS revenue than the metros. But users there are change averse, but in low value but high frequency. Word of mouth is critical and though women make decisions, it’s the men who buy in rural India. Adoption is being driven by lack of entertainment and information sources, as well as cultural affiliations, so there’s a need to make services more relevant, family oriented, as well as affordable.
Pankaj Thakar, CEO of Cellcast, chairing the session said that there might be a market for Panchayat Radio, and useful services will be adopted. Asked about user generated content, Mariam Mathew added that it is a part of their strategy as no one wants news forced on to them; it’s all about percieved value of content.
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