Zen Mobile: Zen and the art of selling

Zen Mobile, one of the several homespun mobile phones that have come up in the last year or so, is ready with its first television commercial with Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan. The TVC focuses on the long-lasting battery of its phones. Zen Mobile Chief Executive Officer Vaibhav Shastri says: “We have a budget of Rs 25 crore for the October to December quarter, which will cover 360-degree activation across television, print and outdoor avenues. We had cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and Bachchan in mind. It took us three-and-a-half months to close the deal with Bachchan.”

Zen Mobile, Shatsri claims, sells 200,000 to 250,000 handsets units every month. It sources from two Chinese vendors, and sells through 600 distributors in the country.

The campaign is a part of several activities that the company has lined up in the extremely competitive market. It is sponsoring the post-match analysis on television for the cricket series between India, Australia and New Zealand that will continue till November. Also, Zen Mobile’s handsets, the Z77 and Z90, will be shown in Kunal Kohli’s yet-to be released movie, Break Ke Baad.

The TVC starts in a rustic setting. It is dark and a crowd is glued to a dance number from the Bollywood movie, Dhoom. Bachchan plays the projectionist, and he is shown busy counting the collections from the show. Suddenly, the projector turns off. The camera moves to a collective sigh of disgust and disappointment in the crowd. Everyone screams at Bachchan and demands refund. Bachchan, in turn, shows them Zen Mobile’s M-25 handset. When the crowd surrounding Bachchan asks inquisitively about the object, he replies: “Yeh hai Zen mobile mini-theatre (this is the mini-theatre from Zen mobile).” Bachchan then plays a video of the film on the handset, and the crowd looks happy again. The next shot explains other features of the handset, while focusing on its 72-hour battery life. Bachchan finds two women standing behind him who want to watch another video. Bachchan replies: “This handset can play 10 videos instead of just one.” The TVC ends with the voice-over: “Zen Mobile: Start a following.”

Shastri, who started Micromax mobile along with its other shareholders but has now branched out on his own, believes that getting Bachchan as the brand ambassador has not only increased the brands’ visibility but has lifted the distributors’ confidence too. The brief to Bates 141, says Shastri, was to focus on the long-battery feature of the handset. “We had come out with our first TVC in March this year which was the launch campaign,” says he.

Homegrown mobile handset manufacturers such as Micromax, Spice, Karbonn, Lava and Zen Mobile have got more than 20 per cent market share, according to industry estimates. To get into the markets in the non-metro cities, Micromax has signed Akshay Kumar as its brand ambassador; in Wynn mobiles’ recent TVC, Saif Ali Khan and Bipasha Basu explain its long-lasting battery models.