IMC OF AIRTEL

PROJECT REPORT
ON
“INTEGRATED MARKETING
COMMUNICTION OF
AIRTEL BY
BHARTI AIRTEL LIMITED”
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mehul.gondaliya
Email id: gondaliya.mehul101@gmail.com
Submitted By:
Mehul B. Gondaliya (13M52)
Submitted To:
Prof. (Dr.) Rajnikant P. Patel
Director and Head,
GHPIBM
G.H. Patel P.G. Institute of Business Management
Sardar Patel University,
Vallabh Vidyanagar.

About Bharti Airtel
Bharti Airtel Limited is a leading global telecommunications company with
operations in 20 countries across Asia and Africa. Headquartered in New Delhi,
India, the company ranks amongst the top 4 mobile service providers globally in
terms of subscribers. In India, the company's product offerings include 2G, 3G and
4G wireless services, mobile commerce, fixed line services, high speed DSL
broadband, IPTV, DTH, enterprise services including national & international long
distance services to carriers. In the rest of the geographies, it offers 2G, 3G wireless
services and mobile commerce. Bharti Airtel had nearly 287 million customers
across its operations at the end of Dec 2013.
Business Divisions of Bharti Airtel
A) Mobile Services:
Bharti Airtel offers GSM mobile services in all the 22-telecom circles of India and is the
largest mobile service provider in the country, based on the number of customers.
B) Telemedia Services:
The group offers high-speed broadband with the best in class network. With fixed line
services in 87 cities, we help you stay in touch with your friends & family and keep you updated
round the clock.
C) Airtel Business:
Airtel business provides a broad portfolio of services to large Enterprise, Government,
Small & Medium businesses and carrier customers. It is India's leading and most trusted provider
of communication and ICT services, offering services that include voice, data, network
integration, data center & managed services, enterprise mobile applications and digital media.
D) Digital TV Services:
Discover the magical experience of digital entertainment with Airtel. From DVD quality
picture and sound, the best and widest variety of channels and Programmers to the best on-
demand content on Airtel Live, your TV viewing experience change forever with digital TV from
Airtel.

About Airtel Brand
Airtel was born free, a force unleashed into the market with a relentless and
unwavering determination to succeed. A spirit charged with energy, creativity and
a team driven “to seize the day” with an ambition to become the most admired
telecom service provider globally. Airtel, in just ten years of operations, rose to the
pinnacle of achievement and continues to lead.
As India's leading telecommunications company, Airtel brand has played the
role of a major catalyst in India's reforms, contributing to its economic resurgence.
Today Airtel touch people's lives with Mobile services, Telemedia services, to
connecting India's leading 1000+ corporates. Airtel also connect Indians living in
USA, UK and Canada with our call home service.

The Indian Telecom Sector
India's telecommunication network is the third largest in the world on the basis
of its customer base and it has one of the lowest tariffs in the world enabled by
the hyper-competition in its market. Major sectors of the Indian
telecommunication industry are telephony, internet and broadcasting. The
Telephonic network in the country, employs an extensive system of network
elements such as digital telephone exchanges, mobile switching centers, media
gateways and signaling gateways at the core, interconnected by a wide variety of
transmission systems using media, such as optical fiber or Microwave radio relay.
The Indian telecom industry underwent significant market liberalization in the
1990s, and it has now become one of the most competitive telecom markets in
the world. India has the world's second-largest mobile phone user base with
over 929.37 million users as of May 2012. It has the world's third-largest Internet
user-base with over 121 million as of December 2011.
The industry is expected to reach a size of 344,921 crore (US$62.43 billion) by 2012
at a growth rate of over 26 per cent, and generate employment opportunities for
about 10 million people during the same period. According to analysts, the
sector would create direct employment for
2.8 million People and for 7 million indirectly. The total revenue of the Indian
telecom sector
Grew by 7% to 283,207 crore (US$51.26 billion) for 2010–11 financial year, while
revenues from telecom equipment segment stood at 117,039 crore (US$21.18
billion).
Telecommunication has supported the socioeconomic development of India and
has played a significant role to narrow down the rural-urban digital divide to
some extent.

Figure 1 - Market share of major
operators in India (February, 2012).
Source: Wikipedia
The telecom sectorin India is undergoing a major change with regards to growth
drivers. Revenue from voice is
going to stabilize and with recent 20% hike in price by major telecom companies,
the tariff war over call rates may be coming to an end. As the telecom industry is
showing signs of slowing down in terms of subscriber growth, companies are
looking at other revenue streams to supplement their core services. Telecom
operators are focusing on innovative m-VAS services such as m-commerce, m-
health, and m-education.

Initial Branding
Initially, the target group was elite professionals since tariff rates were high.
Airtel positioned itself as an inspirational and lifestyle brand. It was pitched not
merely as a mobile service, but as something that gave consumer a badge value.
The Brand was developed to connote leadership in network, innovations, offerings
and services.
The taglines like "Airtel celebrates the spirit of leadership" and "The first choice of
the corporate leaders" emphasized that stance.
The ‘Leadership’ campaign was reportedly successful.
“Leadership” to “Touch Tomorrow”
Bharti decided to ‘humanize’ the brand ‘Airtel’ in 2000. It started with Bharti
launching its new
‘Touch Tomorrow’ campaign which aimed at strengthening its relationship with its
customers and make the brand ‘softer’ to cater a wide variety of people across the
society.
The advertising became two-pronged: a product-driven communication that
showcased new offerings like the Magic prepaid card, and an emotional
communication to connect with younger people.
“Touch Tomorrow” to “Live Every Moment”
Airtel came out with a new logo. The logo signified a strong, contemporary and
confident symbol for a brand that was always ahead of the rest. It had two solid,
red rectangular forms whose counter forms create an open doorway. Capital “A”
showed leadership and red dot on “i” showed innovation.
LIVE EVERY MOMENT
In 2002, Airtel signed on music composer A R Rahman and changed its tune to
"Live every moment": Rahman's signature tune for Airtel is, perhaps, the most
downloaded ringtone in India.

“Live every moment” to “Express Yourself”
Later, Airtel adopted the "Express yourself" positioning, the emotional angle was
predominant
– It wanted to stand out in what was becoming a highly commoditized, crowded
market.
“Express yourself” to “Har ek friend zaroori hota hai”
Airtel came up with a new logo. The new logo was supposed to give Airtel and the
brand a more
"Youthful and international" look.

The logo is a modern representation of the letter 'a' on a bright red
background.
i. The unique symbol is an interpretation of the ‘a’ in Airtel.
ii. The curved shape & the gentle highlights on the red colour make it warm &
inviting, almost as if it were a living object.
iii. The colour Red shows the heritage. It is the colour of energy & passion that
expresses the dynamism that has made Airtel the success it is today, in India,
and now on the global stage.
iv. The logo is called “The Wave”.

Taglines of Airtel
Timeline depicting the various taglines of Airtel
1995
• Power to keep in touch
• Elite and premium brand
1999
• Touch tomorrow
• With NTP99 ,prices could be dropped,started looking from regional to pan india position
2002
• Live every moment
• To catch some emotions and feelings, brand of the masses
2003
• Express yourself
• To strengthen the emotional connect of customers, wanted a fresh and contemporary idea that
built a brand their customers could identify with
2011
• Har ek friend zaroori hota hai
• Targets the youth with an evergreen theme of Friendship and its relevance
2014
•The Smart Phone Network
• To Promot3G Service andNetworkconncetivity inasmart phone.

G.H.PATEL POST GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT 10
Segmentation, Targeting & Positioning (STP)
This chapter describes the category of the selected product. The chapter is
organized into three sections. Section 1 states segmentation, Section 2 describes
targeting & Section 3 describes the positioning.
1) Segmentation
Due to diminishing marginal returns on its voice revenues, Airtel was forced to
abandon its one size fits all demographic segmentation. It came up with a strategy
where it classified users into different segments. Segmentation can be defined as
the process of dividing the market into customers with similar interests into one
segment
There are basically 4 levels of segmentation and Airtel segmented its market as:
1. Segment marketing:
Here the target market is divided into different segments on the basis
of homogenous needs. Airtel has broadly divided the whole market into 2
categories – prepaid and postpaid.
2. Niche Marketing:
It can be defined as the marketer’s effort to position their product or
service in smaller markets that have similar attributes and have been
neglected by other marketers. AIRTEL launched its product blackberryin this
category which particularly focussed on the upperbusiness class who have to
be in touch with the world every time
3. Local marketing:
In this segment companies have to focus on the requirements of the
local markets to be successful. Airtel is focusing on local marketing by their
low tariff plans in rural and even urban cities.
4. Individual Marketing:
In this segmentation, companies focus on individual customers and try
to be in touch with them by phone calls, email etc. Airtel regularly calls its
every customer and tells them about its new features and schemes

Airtel segmented its consumer market on the basis of:-
1. Geographical segmentation: The market is divided into groups based on
demographic attributes such as localities, regions, cities, density etc. Airtel
segments the market on the basis of states, as they have different plans for
different states. Thedifferent geographic regions are handled independently and
different campaigns are run according to the tastes and preferences of people in
each region.
2. Demographic segmentation: The market is divided into groups based on
demographic attributes like age, gender, income, occupation, religion, family life
cycle etc
i. Age and lifecycle: Recognizing that senior citizens have the need to keep
in touch with their children and relatives who may be located far away,
Airtel came up with a senior plan which offered a discount on one STD
number and one local number. Besides, subscribers of this plan would get
special discounts for health check-ups and would have a facility to club
bills with that of their children
ii. Gender: The Company has also launched special packages to target the
women. Airtel had started the Ladies Special plan targeted at women and
allowed subscriber to receive special beauty and lifestyle tips, apart from
subscriptions tocosmopolitan and housekeeping magazines. The plan also
offers women the option to club the monthly bills with that of their
spouses.
iii. Income: Airtel also segmented the market on the basis of income
through their corporate plans. They had started the corporate scheme on
the basis of the higher usage rate and higher income persons.
iv. Generation: Airtel had started ‘Friendz’ pre-paid connection, SMS plans
and VAS like hello tunes, which was targeted towards the 15-25 year age.
This includes phone-to- phone (P2P) recharge facility, enabling the
consumer to transfer talk time and validity to any Airtel prepaid
subscriber. In addition comes the introduction of ‘Hot Spot’ tariffs where
Airtel Friendz customers can enjoy tariff discounts at pre-designated
places within the city.

3. Psychographic segmentation:
In this segmentation, marketers segment the market on the basis of
motivation, values, belief, lifestyle, personality etc.
Lifestyle: Airtel focused its attention on two groups in particular.
The first group was known as "funsters" -- consumers aged between 18-35 years old,
who share a common trait -- a high adoption of VAS. Airtel believes that with some
targeted marketing, spending from this group can increase quite significantly. The
Telco has exclusive tie-ups with application providers like Google and has
identified music-on-demand as a key value proposition.
The other segment of focus is the "achievers", who are the top five percent of
mobile users. While this segment isn't a high adopter of VAS, it contributes to
revenues nearly 10 times that of Airtel's ARPU.
To enhance customer experience for this segment, Airtel has separate priority
relationship managers. It also partnered with HTC and Blackberry to offer high-
end handsets catering specifically for those customers who want to be in touch
with their peers or their subordinates, colleagues etc.
Personality: Airtel last year had also started life Time Validity scheme for the
persons who are not financially strong and can’t afford the normal schemes
4. Behavioral segmentation:
Organizations also divide the market on the basis of behaviour that the
customer shows towards the usage of products. Various variables for segmenting
market on the basis of purchase behaviour of customers are occasions,
benefits, user status, user rate, loyalty etc.
Occasions: Airtel on the occasion of Independence Day, introduced a recharge
coupon of Rs 1947 with two years validity for its Delhi and NCR prepaid customers
Benefits: Airtel also provides various tangible and intangible benefits for its
customers.
Like Airtel launched various tangible benefits like validity schemes for its
customers and intangible benefits like roaming, voice mail, fax mail, close user
group etc.

Usage rate: Airtel very often comes up with schemes like Get the
talk time of 1111 on the recharge on 1000 i.e. getting more talk time value for which
customers are paying.
Targeting
Airtel has targeted the premium and upper middle class. The motto behind this is
only those segments should be targeted who value time and have the paying
capacity. During the introduction stage there was a huge pressure to get consumers
across to hook up with their brand, because getting them to Airtel by their earlier
brand and switching their brand loyalty was too tough. Airtel marketers have been
concentrating totally on the business executive class but now that the basic viable
volumes has been built up and prices have declined to a certain extent they are
planning to venture further field.
TARGETING AREAS
i. Professionals by giving free calls in postpaid connections.
ii. Entrepreneurby giving various plan in which they may get internal calling
free.
iii. Youth with the „FRIENDZ‟ Scheme.
iv. Targeting Students by introducing postpaid connection only for students
and with zero rentals.

Positioning:
The product is supposed to be a business efficiency tool. A lifestyle revolution
and a status symbol. The emphasis is to remove misconception that the cell phone
is an expensive means of communication. It’s a day to day use commodity and is no
more a symbol of status.
When it comes to Airtel who can forget the melodious, sweet music of its
composed by A.R.Rehman. The music attracts us in various forms such as chorus,
whistle, piano and in many other forms. The latest advertisements of Airtel “Jo tera
hai who mera hai” and “Kyun ki hare k friend jaruri hot hai” have created a brand
image in the minds of youngsters. This is one of the positioning strategy of Bharti
Airtel.
It was during this period that they also ran the “Breaking Barriers” campaign
under the express yourself campaign. It was a sign of the brand taking off globally
and also to indicate that it had the largest market presence in the Nation.

Integrated Marketing Communication
Advertising
The purpose of advertising is motivating but to sell something a product, a
service or an AIRTEL. The real objective of advertising is effective communication
between producers and consumers. In other words the ultimate purpose all
advertising is “Increased awareness” list of the following specific objectives of
advertising.
a) To make on immediate AIRTEL
b) To build primary demand
c) To introduce a price deal
d) To inform about a products availability
e) To increase market share
f) To help salesman by building on awareness of a product among retailers
g) To increase the frequency use of a product
h) To build overall company image
i) To build brand recognition
IMC Tools
Advertising
Sales
Promotion
Public
Relations
Sponsorship

Airtel has been the first player in India to offer some niche
services like Blackberry, Caller Tunes, and personalized ringtones and has even
attached itself with the biggest names like Sachin Tendulkar, AR Rahman and
Shahrukh Khan to promote the brand.
Airtel has always backed on human relations and emotions in their brand
communication through its advertisements focusing on the emotional content. The
brand promotions have come a long way with its signature tune composed by AR
Rahman in the year 2002, to the latest campaigns inspired by the theme of
friendship.
Hoarding a advertisement of Airtel
Here we are showing advertisement used to promote internet service.

1)
Hyperlink for this advertisement: -
1) airtel - dil jo chahe, paas laye.webm
2) AirTel Advertisement - A R Rahman.mp4
In the 2010, Airtel launched a new signature tune and it even rebranded its logo
and launched the “Dil Jo Chahe Paas Laaye” campaign. This initiative was taken to
target the corporate and post-paid subscribers with its new communication.
2)
Hyperlink for this advertisement:
1) Airtel Har Ek Friend Zaroori Hota Hai Song with Lyrics.mp4
Dil jo chahe, paas laye in 2010
Har Ek Friend Zaroori Hota Hai

In 2011, the brand launched the “Har Ek Friend Zaroori Hota Hai”
campaign with a same signature tune modified to focus on the youth and targeting
itself as “The friendship brand”. The campaign was a huge success with its lively
tune. Since then, Airtel’s campaigns have been inspired by the theme of friendship.
3)
Hyp
erli
nk
for
this
adv
erti
sem
ent:
-
1)
Airtel 'jo mera hai wo tera hai, Jo tera hai wo mera TVC.mp4
2) Airtel My First Internet Ad 15 Secs.mp4
In the year 2012, it launched the latest Ad campaign which complemented the
earlier ad, focusing on friendship – “Jo Mera Hai Who Tera Hai”, which is again a
hit amongst the viewers and its customers.
Jo Mera Hai Who Tera Hai

4)
Hyperlink for this advertisement: - airtel Re 1 Mobile Video - Taxi Ad (TVC).mp4
In the year 2013, it launched the 'Rs 1 Entertainment Store' Airtel continues to
leverage the affordable 'Rs 1' tag to simplify data services for its customers and
encourage the mobile internet experience among first-time users across India.
Rs 1 Entertainment Store

5)
In the year 2014:
I. Airtel launched the “The Boss Film” , focusing on working class , which is
again hit among the viewers and its customers.
II. Airtel lunched “Talk all night long, with unlimited internet and calls from
Airtel”, they focusing on Couples, Which is more emotional advertisement
and it will attract more customers to unlimited Internet and calls.
1) Talk all night long, with unlimited internet and calls from airtel.mp4
2) New Airtel Ad So Romantic! sweet voice, awesome !.mp4
III. Airtel lunched “Smart Phone Network” camping Lunched for specially 3G
internet service, it is Effective campaign for a smartphone, now a day smart
phone user increasing in India so the company focused on smart phone
network.
1) airtel new 5 star film.mp4
2) Largest 3G network on airtel - The Smartphone Network.mp4
“The Boss” “Talk all nightlong,withunlimitedinternetandcalls”

Publicity and public relations:
A variety of programs designed to promote and protect a company’s image and
its products”, by high-credibility/ability to catch buyer’s off-guard. This will cover
gaps between the company’s point-of-view and media-coverage. This can create
/maintain corporate-identity/Improve Company’s-reputation/build relationships
with media etc. It’s a cost-effective tool which has message flexibility and useful for
crisis management.
Airtel starts 4G demo in a public place, it is create awareness of first 4G service
lunched by Airtel. Airtel also give free 4G service to customers for Experience of 4G.
Hyperlink - Airtel Delhi Half Marathon 2011.mp4
In 2011, Airtel start publicityby Delhi Half Marathone event. The above video shows
public warring Airtel T-Shirts and Bag.
Sponsorship:-
The company goes for sponsoring events in order to heighten the company and
brand image. Mostly the company goes for financing such kind of events in which
its product has got some room to build likeness. The company also goes for
sponsoring Satyamev Jayat show.
Hyperlink for this Sponsorship: -
1)Satyamev Jayate - Bus Film.mp4
2)Airtel Satyamev Jayate _ Airtel Money.mp4

WEBOGRAPHY
1) https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Airtel+2014+Celebration
2) http://www.slideshare.net/sundar786/marketing-projectreportairtel
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promotional_mix
4) http://www.slideshare.net/airtel
5) http://www.afqus.com/airtel

IMC OF AIRTEL

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