The Hindu Business Line : Consumer education key to Tata Sky brand building

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Chennai Jan. 25 The ad opens like many others — distinct visuals of a school with a lot of little Einsteins, bright and eager, running into class, homework done and ever ready to answer any question the teacher throws at them. Just when you are all too ready to believe in the dream-like quality of such angelic children, the tag line proudly announces that it's all thanks to the Tata Active Whizkids channel.

Okay so it's an ad and just a claim, right? `Not so right' if the Tata Sky marketers are to be believed. They claim that their ads are an integral part of a carefully planned marketing strategy that has in a span of five months helped them build the DTH category and the brand. "The success of our strategy is evident in the kind of response the company has generated in urban and rural India. We have logged close to 3.25 lakh subscribers across India in just six months," Mr Vikram Mehra, Head, Consumer Marketing, Tata Sky. The company's distribution network has expanded to 3,500 cites and it has close to 16,000 dealers across India. Besides customers in India, its base stretches to the Burma border, Siachen and Ladakh and the Pakistan border.

Marketing phases

Its marketing strategy happened in three distinct phases — Phase 1 was to educate consumers about satellite television and its attributes; Phase 2 was to educate consumers about the interactive features; and Phase 3 was to educate consumers about the benefits of satellite television versus digital cable in CAS markets.

Though the company wasn't the first to enter the DTH market Mr Mehra says, "Our qualitative as well as quantitative research confirmed that awareness levels for DTH were extremely low. Even TAM research data presented in August 2006 validated that."

Regular brand tracks across the country are conducted to find awareness levels. The data and sales pattern confirmed very high awareness for the service across the country.

"According to our latest brand track, we enjoy a total brand awareness scores of over 85 per cent in our target group," says Mr Mehra.

Benefit-driven approach

While selecting the nature and content of its ads and billboards the main debate hedged between making them feature driven or adopting a benefit driven approach. "The feature-driven approach was rejected based on research feedback — consumers found it too technology heavy. Hence, we decided to tell subscribers what benefits they get from the product rather than talk about the features," says Mr Mehra.

Thus, the billboards were direct in what they had to say, even at the risk of being boring. But it paid off when the company got an edge in the CAS markets because of the high brand recall and the marketing pull.

"Dealer feedback validates that consumers specifically ask for Tata Sky at the outlet. A regular feedback mechanism through research conducted by external agencies and our own call centre helps us refine our strategy," says Mr Mehra.

In future, the company hopes to maintain its 360 degree approach to marketing with uniform communication across media.

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