How Advertising Impacts Behavior Of Cellular Phone Consumers In Pakistan

Published by Atif Tahir on August 21, 2008 06:00 pm under Business, Emerging Markets Telecom, Marketing,

Media, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Companies, Mobile Phones, Telecommunications

Advertising is paid form of marketing communication mix

which attempts to persuade potential prospects to purchase and influences existing customers to

consume more of a particular product or service. Being controllable marketing mix variable, it plays a

vital role from the marketer’s perspective by informing, educating and facilitating the customer in

getting aware about the product or a service, relating needs to these products and services,

performing evaluation and finally purchasing a product or service.

However, consumer behavior is not directly dependant or resultant of advertising. Another important

aspect of advertising message is to develop brand image. Consumer behavior in this regard is

dependant upon many other critical factors which are more important from the customer’s perspective

after they have attained an exposure to an advertising message. These factors are evaluation of

alternatives and most important is post purchase evaluation where consumer evaluates the service

for need satisfaction, value for the money and service provider’s promise against the actual benefit

received.

Brand image, Brand equity, and positive or negative both will depend upon the fulfillment of the

service promise being advertised. Similarly re-purchase will occur in the same manner. If the service is
 being delivered as per commitment, potential consumer will be listening to the advertising message

with more interest and element of loyalty and vice versa.

Cellular operators in Pakistan have huge spending on mass media. Due to severe price war, they are

also able to get the targeted percentage of trial besides existing market share. However, consumer’s

behavioral response to the aggressive media call will still remain dependant upon the actual service

differentiation. The more this differentiation is on the core service level, the more it shall meet the

needs of the targeted prospects in an advertising message and there will be more trials, purchases

and re-purchases. Further to this service differential at augmented service level within service variants

or in value added services re-assures hearing to the advertising message and responding to the

message.

The major role of advertising would be to inform, persuade, generate trial and build brand image at

the initial stages of the consumer behavior process illustrated above. Later on if trial is successful,

customer will be more interested in listening to the operator’s message.

An operator’s loyal customer went for the BLACKBERRY device being advertised by the operator.

Customer was only interested in the device due to some features and not in the Black Berry Internet

Service and wanted that device should also work on other operator’s SIM as well. Finally, customer

found out that the device is locked for other operators. This aspect was kept hidden by the operator.

Therefore, from the customer’s perspective, the advertising message became useless and also

generated a negative image. At the end, customer bought an unlocked device from another operator

which supports all networks and also became consumer of their postpaid service while terminating the

service from the first subscriber. For this consumer, first operator’s message for the Black Berry device

will not result into any favorable behavior.

Hence, advertising may have a strong impact on consumer as stimuli; however behavior will not be

dependant upon adverting but on actual value delivered by the service.

8 Comments so far

1. Shariq Syed on August 22nd, 2008

 No pun intended but the whole article looks tad bookish. The marketing has long evolved from product

centric approach (features-and-benefits) to more customer centric approach (evoking customer’s

positive emotion towards the brand).

As for above argument about value being the bottom line for establishing a successful brand &

customer relationship or making actual purchase, if you look around you will find out that many of the

most successful brands (globally) are actually inferior to their competitor’s in-terms of product/ service

quality with the core differentiations comes down only to their communication strategies…

Below is an excerpts of my blog article in which i have shed some light on marketing dilemma inflicted

on our telecom industry.

“As a marketing practitioner, I always felt that the traditional “feature-and-benefit” based marketing

generally result in people avoiding messages wherever possible & by any means possible. The current

obsessive uses of mass media without connecting the brand message to intending audience have led

marketers to a large pool of switchers rather a group of loyal customers. This phenomenon is

particularly inflicted upon our highly advertised local telecom industry with every player wanting to out

done each other with heavy usage of mass media with out trying to establish messages which are

personally relevant, memorable, sensory, emotional and meaningful to their target audience.

In today’s market place where consumers have changed dramatically, and are over exposed with all

kind of brand messages, the new age marketers now need to look at how to reach these customers &

how best to win their loyalty”

If you want to go through the complete article, you may visit to my blog

http://artistryofbranding.wordpress.com/

Cheers…

2. Babar Bhatti on August 22nd, 2008

Welcome back Atif - good to see your post after a while.

3. Babar Bhatti on August 22nd, 2008

 Shariq - thanks for your comments and view point. Good points about the heavy (ab)use of mass

media by the telcos.

I am no expert at marketing but as a consumer I can tell you that brand loyalty is extremely hard to

establish for markets such as Pakistan. In the end its the quality and cost of service which wins.

4. Shariq Syed on August 23rd, 2008

@ Babar - i am also not claiming any marketing champion’s tag… You are indeed right that the quality

& cost of product/services matters but what i was highlighting that as this is a very simple equation

for all the organizations to strategize than why majority of organization are struggling to keep their

customers (locally as well as internationally).

The best deal/ solution (good quality with low cost of product/services) for you might be different from

me & that can be totally different to say for Mr. XYZ. The actual answer lies in the word called

“Perception”, the art of marketing/ advertising is to develop a high perceived value of brand in

comparison with the competition.

What i have tried is to just shed a small light on this dilemma… as some wise guy has said

“Understanding the problem is the first & foremost step towards solving the problem”.

I hope i haven’t written too much this time though…

Cheers…

5. Bilal on August 23rd, 2008

But I guess when it comes to the choice of being loyal to brand or to your family in providing them

food and other basics of life, we know what the consumer would reach for ultimately. Like they say in

urdu, ‘khanay kay lalay aur khuwab nawabon walay :)

Bilal

6. Babar Bhatti on August 26th, 2008

 Shariq - point taken. Perception management is hard. Thanks for your comments - we love these

discussions.

7. Shariq Syed on August 27th, 2008

Babar- Thanks for the acknowledgment…

In your previous post you touched on a very common notion that “brand loyalty is extremely hard to

establish for markets such as Pakistan” which made me wonder that is really something wrong in the

mindset of our local customer or as a marketing community we are missing any point.

I have written an article on my blog to identify the real cause…, the article can be viewed on

http://artistryofbranding.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/why-pakistan-is-a-difficult-market-to-develop-

brand-loyalty-or-are-we-missing-a-point/

8. hammad hassan on October 12th, 2008

Dear aLL,

Need Reply of two simple questions

1.How much on an average a telecom firm spending on Communication mix of their revenue.

2.What are companies doing to bring back the churned customers preemptively.Is this not a major

challenge to all of these companies.

Thanks

Hammad Faisalabad.

0321-966786

hammi786@yahoo.com