Excerpts from Mr. Gopal Vittal, Director Marketing & Communication, Bharti Airtel appeared in ET’s 11th March 2008 edition – Winning In Chaos: Just do, learn and do
Mr. Gopal talks about the nature of the telecom service provider business. He draws parallel between the FMCG & telecom service busines as these two industries have direct interaction with mass consumers. He notes that telecom service providing is totally different from FMCG in terms of compression of the planning cycle, value of speed, challenges of addressing diversity of consumers through a single brand, dramatic changes in the consumer profile as subscribers start discovering new ways of using mobile.
But I am not sure whether I agree with all these. First the compression of the planning cycle; now I guess even in FMCG industry the product management has to be really efficient to constantly updating or customizing the product according to end user tastes/lifestyle. Won’t this be similar to the telecom service consumption behavior of the end users, and will this behavior change so fast? But yes, the difference could be that there is no real product for consuming in telecom service business as it is only using of the voice network that is already in place. There is some difference in terms of content based service as there is a scope of defining real assets and also there is an option to bring in getting external parties to bring products under operator’s brand.
Now addressing diversity of of consumer through a single brand; again in telecom service also there are different products created to address different consumers. The segmentatation would obviously different for telecom service when compared to FMCG. But whether the telecom service provider can create a “brand” to address these segments or are they trying to address all these segments through the overall brand, say ‘Airtel’? Now isn’t Virgin Mobile trying to create a brand that targets only the teens?
However I like Mr. Vittal’s suggestion to handle the chaos. I can easily relate this to product management in an environment where consumer behavior/lifestyle is changing very fast. He mentions having a deep-rooted consumer centricity regarless of environment is the first cruicial factor that can work in managing, navigating and winning in a chaos environment. He gives how tracking consumer behavior (e.g., using mobile device to fill those ‘empty moments’) can help service provider to come out with products suiting such behavior. Now to understand that behavior one needs to keep track of the behavior and learn from the experiences of the previous product launches. For this it doesn’t matter whether you do an elaborate planning or just get on with a skeleton planning and keep improving.
