Every product
or service available in the market goes through its life cycle which broadly
entails four stages: introduction, growth, maturity and decline. The PLC
concept can be used to analyze a product category, a product form, a product or
a brand. Depending upon the current demand for a product in the market &
its future growth potential along with many other micro & macroeconomic
changes that take place during a product’s evolution & the ability of the producers, marketers
& the sellers of the product to continue to adapt & innovate at every
stage of that evolution, each product goes through its unique life cycle.
The producers/providers, the
marketeers as well as the marketers must adapt with changing times & find
new ways to keep their businesses profitable & stay relevant in the market.
At every stage of the evolution of a product, it’s the unique value
propositions, offerings & positioning that can differentiate a particular
brand from its competitors. As this blog is dedicated to illustrating &
understanding various aspects of marketing
by relating them to various marketing & other strategies adopted to
promote & sell a particular product/service, which in this case is
Vodafone, we will now focus on various strategies adopted by Vodafone at
different stages of its evolution as a brand to prove how Vodafone as a brand
has managed not only to evolve & change but also to continuously progress
through innovation and implementation.
Here, I am going to use the
deductive reasoning method to prove my point where I would propose a hypothesis
& move forward by providing all the relevant information & data to
prove my hypothesis, so my hypothesis is that as a brand Vodafone’s life cycle
is going to be a one with scalloped pattern. Before I move forward, I must
explain in brief what a scalloped pattern of a PLC is & what it looks
like.
Shown above is a scalloped
patterned growth trajectory of a product. Here, sales pass through a succession
of life cycles based on the discovery of new product characteristics, uses or
users. My hypothesis is that Vodafone as a brand will go through such a growth
trajectory as it continues to innovate & reinvent itself by not only
recognizing the opportunities available in the market but also by continuing to
build its brand value by delivering a superior, consistent & differentiated
customer experience.
Before I talk about various
strategies adopted by Vodafone, lets first define what a strategy is. As per Johnson’s and Scoles’ definition,
strategy is the direction and scope of an organization over the long term which
achieves advantage for the organization through its configuration of resources
within changing environments to meet the needs of the markets and to fulfil
stakeholders’ expectations. Now let’s see what strategies Vodafone has adopted
over the years & what others it is planning to adopt in the future &
check whether all those strategies fit in the definition mentioned above.
The
first thing which differentiates Vodafone from its competitors is its method of
segmentation. The main categories in which Vodafone has segmented its customers
are Geographic (Circle A, Circle B, Circle C), Demographic (Income, Age, Nature of the customer),
Psychographic (Lifestyle & personality), Behavioral (Benefits sought, usage
rate, Types of services required). Thus, Vodafone provides customized services
to the customers as per their requirements & usage patterns. For example
they offer prepaid plans ranging from INR 10 to INR 200.
The next part of their unique
strategy is their marketing & advertising. A new Marketing Framework has been developed and implemented
across the business, which includes a new vision of expanding the Group’s
category from mobile only to total communications. Their aim is to be the communications leader in an increasingly
connected world. Through their various creative advertising & promotion
campaigns they have demonstrated that great ideas executed with a vision &
passion make more of a difference than
other clichéd promotion techniques. Even though Vodafone has not hired a known face
toendorse itself, it has still managed to establish a very high “emotional
connect” with its customers through its brilliantly conceived marketing
strategies. For example
Zoozoos Vs Shahrukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, M.S. Dhoni & Abhishek Bachhan.
Another very crucial factor is brand
experience. Vodafone continues to implement
Vodafone’s promise of “helping customers make the most of their time”. Their communication strategy has always focused on “Happy to help”
which tends to strike an emotional chord with the customer. Vodafone
continues to use a customer measurement system called “customer delight” to
monitor and drive customer satisfaction in the Group’s controlled markets at a
local and global level which identifies areas for improvement and focus. 2006: 69.9%, 2007: 70.6%, 2008:
73.1%.
The
most important factors of Vodafone’s strategy are product development &
diversification. It’s 3G service in India
which would be a quantum leap for browsing and internet based mobile
applications and services. 3G would also result in improved connectivity and
clearer reception as it provides a greater network capacity which is achieved
through improved spectral efficiency. In order to diversify its current market
portfolio, Vodafone is launching a global Machine to Machine (M2M) service
platform for helping companies to deploy and manage large, wireless M2M
projects for applications in customer service enhancement and central control
and automation of projects. In the Indian context, M2M is an untapped sector
with enormous potential for growth. WiBRO (Wireless Broadband) ,has the
capacity to overcome data rate of limitation of mobile phones by providing a
staggering 30 to 50 MB/s speed. As in the case of M2M platforms, WiBRO is a very
promising market in India. Providing these two services in India would open new
avenues of growth for Vodafone and would help it diversify into different
market verticals.
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