The city of Mumbai is covered with the advertising blitzkrieg unleashed by Tata DoCoMo, the latest entrant into the highly competitive GSM cellularservice market in the country. Bridges, buses, hoardings on busy intersections all scream out their message “Per second billing”, enticing you to switch to the service and pay for only the time you talk.
The pricing is brilliantly simple at 1 paisa for each second making it sound cost effective. But look deeper and you will find that in fact talking for a whole minute on Tata DoCoMo will cost you twenty per cent more than its rivals! For example, the average cost of a local call is about 50 paisa per minute on Vodafone but with this service you would actually pay 60p. But the marketer is playing on our psychology that we do not talk in blocks of one minute and this will save us in our overall billing. And this is where the marketter wins.
The positioning seems to be working. A news article this morning in the Times of India quotes that over 80,000 people bought sim cards in the very first day in Mangalore alone. Now I do not have stats on how many sim cards sell in the largest cities across the developed world but I am pretty sure it is nowhere near 80,000 and Mangalore is not even the largest city in India.
Tata DoCoMo has managed to catch the pulse of the Indian market. It is doing to the cell phone market what the small sachets of Chic did to the shampoo market- making smaller sizes available at costs that are feasible. Just goes to show that conventional wisdom has a lot to teach us- we just have to be willing to listen and apply is wisely.
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