Brands back to feature phones

Targeting users of feature phones, brands are choosing the very Indian habit of missed calls over Western tools, for their mobile phone campaigns

While there is no stopping smartphone growth, are advertisers in India willing to give feature phones a miss yet? After all, they still comprise around 71 per cent of the 61.07 million units in the first quarter 2014, according to IDC.

While apps and games are increasingly being mastered by brands hungry to reach the swelling number of smartphone owners (growing at 186 per cent year-on-year), the penetration of smartphones is still low (10 per cent, according to IDC).

Advertising agencies and their clients seem to be keeping that in mind when weaving their mobile phone campaigns. They are putting the very Indian habit of a 'missed call' (disconnecting after a few rings) to good use. While Hindustan Unilever (HUL) won awards for its missed call-mobile radio activation, Garnier Men, Lóreal's mid-range men's skincare line, has used the missed call tool that is now available on Facebook. And, users of feature phone (that can play music, take photos, access WAP sites, but lack a full-fledged operating system and hence, advanced features) are the biggest gainers.

FEATURE PHONE MARKETING TODAY

• Missed call programmes have reached a threshold on mass media and among smartphone users
• However, as with HUL and Loreal’s Garnier Men, feature phone users participate eagerly
• Social networks take notice. Facebook has launched a missed call app for advertisers

Harshil Karia, co-founder and online strategist at FoxyMoron, the agency which worked on the Garnier Men missed-call campaign on Facebook, says, "Missed-call promos for the audience on 1800-numbers had run their course on mass media. In terms of the response rate, the threshold had been reached. But this tool has not been explored much in mobile advertising, whereas we have clients who would want to target the feature phone audience with their digital budgets."

Missed-call promotions that require the target audience of a brand to ring a number (prefixed with 1800 usually) to participate, are usually managed by firms like Netcore and ZipDial (which has worked on the Facebook app). But the response rate on reach on mass media now hover around 0.5-1 per cent.

However, Foxymoron tried it for its client Garnier Men but this time it was through a mobile phone campaign, and that also harnessing the social media platform of Facebook. While the campaign was done for all kinds of mobile phone users, Karia says that his team made it a point to tell Facebook's global team that the feature phone users outnumbered smartphone users. Karia says, "It told us that smartphone users had reached a kind of limit while feature phone users had earlier remained untapped."

The campaign directed callers to Flipkart with a discount link for Garnier Men's products. "Flipkart has also been working with us to increase their mobile commerce and this tied in neatly with its goal," says Karia. But the response from feature phone users was not restricted to just missed calls or Flipkart's mobile commerce. It had a result that is music to any chief marketing officer's ears - more sales for the brand advertising. Garnier Men wanted to strengthen its association with the Indian Premiere League (the campaign ran during the IPL) besides increasing its online sales.

GARNIER MEN CAMPAIGN

METHOD

• Facebook fans of Garnier Men gave a missed call on a number on their timeline
• User got a call, had to get a couple of questions right
• Got a discount link from Flipkart on mobile
• If user availed of the discounts and purchased Garnier Men’s products, then he could win a chance to meet the players of Rajasthan Royals and Hyderabad Sunrisers (Garnier Men partners with them) or win hospitality tickets at one of their games

RESULT

• There was a parallel phone number in print ads, which cost double that of the inventory bought on Facebook
• The effectiveness (number of missed calls) was 16 times that of print
• Online sales jumped 2.5 times

Garnier Men saw a 2.5-time increase in its online sales. Lóreal, the parent of Garnier, has been pushing its brands online. Rupika Raman, general manager, Garnier India, says that this is the first step in the company's overall digital push: "The next phase would be click to interact. The interaction could either be advice or entertainment". Raman says 12,000 of its Facebook fans had called.

HUL clearly targeted the Hindi belt, especially its media-dark areas, with its Kan Khajura Tesan (created with Lowe and media agency PHD). It lets users give a missed call and receive a call-back when they can choose to listen to songs, jokes and radio jockeys' chatter, albeit interspersed with HUL ads. Priya Nair, vice-president, HUL, said earlier, "Kan Khajura Tesan reached out to more than 11 million subscribers. We have had 180 million minutes of engagement with our consumers and our ads have been heard 100 million times."

SAB Miller, too, has used mobile advertising to include feature phone users. It has asked consumers to request for discounts on Fosters through an SMS, and it would be specific to a store where they want to pick up the beer. While the sales team knows which retailer has given away how many promotional units, marketing has a database of customers whose loyalty can be built on. "We had 500,000 users who picked up the brand without promotions on mass media," says Karia whose team also worked on the campaign.

While advertisers have moved on from mentioning phone numbers in their TV and print ads to actually releasing mobile-specific ads, they are not blindly importing mobile ads from the West. Feature phone-friendly mobile ads are gaining momentum and taking the likes of Facebook along with them.