"We leveraged the existing relationship between daily vendors and households"

What has been the most interesting sales promotion you have engineered?

As a mass-market brand, Uninor constantly attempts to explore retail channels and touchpoints that bring us closer to our customers. The attempt is to become better integrated into the daily lives of the subscribers with our 'sabse sasta' services. Our Uninor's Retail Next programme, in particular, was instrumental in bringing in retail partners that never sold a mobile connection or recharge anywhere in India before. In Pune, and later across several other cities in Maharahstra, Uninor converted auto-rickshaws, newspaper and milk vendors and even security guards into sales partners - places and people with whom a new mobile connection or recharge for an existing Uninor subscription was readily available.

Who did you primarily target with it - new or existing customers or both?

The programme targeted both new and existing subscribers. Our endeavour was to go where our customers existed - both current and potential -instead of waiting for them to find us at retail stores.

For our existing customers, we offered the ease and simplicity of a recharge right at their doorstep. For the new customers, this promotion by Uninor promised the extension of the same ease and convenience.

How was the promotion designed?

The inspiration for this programme came from a discussion that Uninor's circle business head of Maharashtra had with an auto driver who told him that many of his passengers asked him to stop at various neighbourhood mobile recharge shops for quick top-up.

This insight helped us come up with a programme to train and equip auto drivers to recharge mobile phones for his passengers as a value addition. We decided to extend the concept to newspaper vendors and milkmen who visited numerous households every day and were anyway adept at conducting basic financial transactions.

The autos were branded with "Uninor Auto Recharge" logo and charts with various product offerings from Uninor were placed inside the vehicle. All enlisted auto drivers and other partners were extensively trained and then attached to a Uninor distributor for stocks and delivery of customer agreement forms.

What were the challenges?

The main challenge was that of training all the partners involved. Something like this hadn't been attempted before and we knew it was important to get the execution right. Given that our focus was to train these people well - particularly on the guidelines for filling up new subscriber forms - our challenge actually became our biggest opportunity.

Who partnered you in it? What was the impact on sales and brand?

For auto-rickshaws, Uninor partnered with local auto rickshaw unions. Other partners - including milkmen and newspaper vendors were contacted directly. The impact of this programme has been on different levels. On the sales front, together the 94 auto-rickshaws and 20 milkmen and newspaper vendors, 23 insurance agents and others are making close to 800 new sales and recharge transactions each month. Beyond the direct contribution, these channels are taking the Uninor brand and its 'sabse sasta' positioning in unconventional ways to households, ensuring that the promotion is discussed, thus, helping us strengthen the brand conversation.

Was there any middle ground struck between tactics and strategy with this sales promotion?

As a strategy, Uninor focuses on three pillars - to be the best in basic services, to be the best in low-cost operations and to excel in mass market distribution. As a tactic, this concept is in line with the Uninor strategy. It helps us build further on a mass market distribution platform by extending our retail reach right to where the mass market customer is. It takes our brand and our services to our mass market customers in unusual and unconventional ways - which entail only a small cost for the company.

Will it be relevant today?

The reason why this programme has longevity and scalability is that this is in effect an extension of Uninor's retail strategy to push through new and unconventional channels. The best part is it doesn't necessitate high initial investments. While this programme was started as a pilot with 10 autos in Vishrantwadi area of Pune, it is now a full-fledged programme with 94 autos, 43 newspaper vendors, milkmen etc in six cities in Maharashtra. Spurred by the success of this promo, the company is now exploring such platforms in some rural markets too.

Don't sales promotions incur high long term costs for the company?

This is where the Retail Next platform scores. Concepts such as auto-recharge and using existing relationships that daily vendors have with households come at virtually no additional costs. These partners earn revenues through commissions - much like the traditional retailers. Uninor invests in their training and branding. The entire programme is self sustaining.