The Vodafone brand launched in spectacular style in India last year. Olivia Solon investigates the genesis of the campaign.
 
 
The acquisition
Following the purchase of a 67% stake in Hutchison Essar in India for $11bn in February 2007, Vodafone needed to rebrand India’s fourth-biggest mobile network.
 
“We needed to tell the market that Hutch is now Vodafone and that the customer shouldn’t feel any discomfort in the change. We wanted to show that Vodafone would be as comfortable as Hutch, and later worry about establishing the differentials of the brand,” explains Harit Nagpal, the mobile giant’s marketing and new business director. “When Vodafone came here eight or nine months ago, it came with a bunch of guidelines, but it never came with a dogma. We thought, Vodafone has watched this movie before in many countries and so we knew that we could learn from it.”
 
The challenge
A rebranding on this scale would be no mean feat. There were 35 million customers who needed to get the message. “We had handled the Hutch account for a long time and through many rebrandings, but, to my memory, a rebranding of this scale has not been done by any other company,” said Kartik Sharma, general manager of Maxus, Vodafone’s media agency in India.
 
“We needed a new image, but we wanted to retain the Hutch values. With print it is easy to make a big impact – you just get a front-page solus ad on every newspaper. But television is the main communication channel in India, so we wanted to have the equivalent of a front-page solus on TV.”
 
The plan
Sharma says that Maxus came up with 75 ideas to relaunch the brand. The client and agency concluded that a 24-hour road block on a television network, which would see only Vodafone messages in every ad break for a whole day, would be a good solution. The challenge was to find a television network that would be prepared to do this.
 
Star TV, the biggest network in India, had thought about running a virtual roadblock, but needed to find a suitable client. “Our chief executive wanted to see if there was anything we could do that would have the same impact as a front-page solus deal on a newspaper, so we came up with the roadblock idea,” said Paritosh Joshi, president of advertising sales and distribution at Star.
 
“We were looking for an appropriate client, exactly at the same time Vodafone made it clear that it was launching in India.”
 
Star agreed not to play any other ad except Vodafone’s for 24-hours on its 13 channels. Although Star competes against 250 other channels, it has a massive viewership, claiming an audience share of 25-30% in a typical week. The deal included channels in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi, as well as a bundle of three other channels that are part of a joint venture with newspaper group ABP.
 
The creative solution
Vodafone’s creative had to make an impact. The first TV commercial showed the Hutch pug dog going into a pink house – the Hutch brand colour – and then moving out and going into a red house – the Vodafone colour.
 
“To avoid discomfort to consumers, we chose the most endearing pieces of communication from the past five or six years. That meant the ads with the pug dog were used to convey the network and the animated characters were used to communicate the value-added services and customer services,” says Vodafone’s Nagpal. “Customers can think ‘the devices I like have not gone’, which gives them the sense that the services they were used to will not vanish.”
 
Rajiv Rao, group creative director at Ogilvy & Mather, says the Vodafone philosophy is all about empowering and inspiring people to make the most of their time. “The pug is the most recognised and loved symbol of Hutch. While it was used in the context of our network story, it is today the face of the brand. So our communication is all about how the strong fundamentals will continue to get better.”
 
Executing the deal
Vodafone and its agencies were wary about irritating consumers with brand overload as part of the Star deal. Star channels typically have about 10 minutes of advertising per hour, but Vodafone decided five minutes would be much better to avoid too much repetition. This meant increasing programming time.
 
“The client recognised that if there were too many Vodafone adverts, you would turn the customer off instead of turning them on. So, there was a large amount of commercial inventory that needed to be filled,” says Joshi.
 
Star had to convince some 300-350 other advertisers, who would conventionally advertise on the network in any given day, not to advertise for 24 hours. Contractually, Star was able to reschedule other clients’ television spots, although in some cases it was politically sensitive. Telecoms is one of the most aggressive advertiser categories in India, and many of the other advertisers are not only Vodafone competitors, but also bigger spenders with Star.
 
However, Vodafone paid a premium for the roadblock and the surprise element was key to the success of the campaign. Lead times in India are short, which meant that planning was done at the last minute to avoid a copycat response from rivals.
 
Overnight
At 9.00pm on September 20, 2007, the rebranding kicked off in a show on Star Plus. A man in one of the most popular soaps, Meri Awaaz Ko Mil Gayi Roshni, enters a restaurant and looks over to the television. The first ad he sees is the new Vodafone campaign. The next break was timed to run simultaneously across all Star channels, using the two-minute version of the ad.
 
Joshi says it was ‘magical’ to see the ad on the video wall on all of the channels’ screens at the same time. “It was a feat of scheduling. The same ad was across multiple channels in multiple languages.”
 
Other media
Star wasn’t the only beneficiary of the Vodafone budget. Ads also ran on Sony, Zee Network, SaharaOne and many regional channels in the south of India. TV was supplemented with print.
 
The next day creative with the pug dog ran in all the main newspapers. The message also appeared on a wide range of outdoor formats in 150 towns and in 400,000 shops. “We literally had to change 10m square feet of outdoor material overnight” says Sharma. “From a media-planning perspective there are different types of consumers – heavy, light and medium TV-watchers,” said Sharma. “The latter tend to consumer more print and radio. We wanted to plug all of the holes and didn’t want to take a chance. The strapline “Hutch is now Vodafone” was translated into all languages, with stunning but simple visuals.”
 
For radio, there was a new jingle, a more upbeat version of the old Hutch sound, to help reflect the fact the network was being modernised and recast.
 
Follow-up
Since the launch campaign, Vodafone has followed up with brand and offer-led campaigns. Nagpal says: “We are a branded service, not a product you can smell or touch. So we can’t change the wrapper or perfume of the product. The overnight change was followed very quickly with value deals.”
 
Results
Star did a day-after recall with Gold Star viewers scoring 88% awareness of the rebranding. The average figure two weeks later was about 70%.
 
Sharma at Maxus reflects: “It was a completely collaborative effort, once the clients had agreed with the strategy. We worked very closely with Ogilvy. It had the creative input, but Star did a lot of the creative on its channels.”
 
Vodafone’s Nagpal adds: “We achieved our objectives within a very short space of time. I’ve rebranded before, but not ever had the kind of recall we achieved here before.”