Do They Really Know How To Sell Something In India?
—-
Update: UK Ad Authorities have declared iPhone ad as “misleading”. I guess then they should declare it plain fraud in India.
This is a short rant about two of the “big” products launched recently in India in the last one week and how the people behind their sales/marketing teams either try to take the Indian customer for a ride, or shaft themselves.
1. iPhone: The big icon. Bharti Airtel/Vodafone claimed lakhs of pre-registrations, yet no one lined up to buy it. Anyways, to the point. The ads all over the print, digital and broadcast media in India list out 3 major points in one sentence:
-
- A 3G Phone: My a$$. They haven’t even finalized auction details for 3G spectrum in India yet.
- Desktop Class Browser: Without Flash?
- Push E-mail: Oh, the one that Apple already pulled the plug on?
Anyways, even if this were to be true, nobody would have bought it for the steep price for something that hardly even performs properly as a phone.
2. BIG TV: This is the “real” big one, from the stable of none other than Reliance/Anil Dhirubhai Ambani. Ok, it’s supposed to be good, very good. I checked out their website to see how good. What do I get?
-
- A flash only site. No fallback. Did they get it coded from a high-school flash junkie?
- After 15 minutes of looking around clicking on 10s of links, going in circles, I’m still confused. What exactly are their packages. There are so many rates and offers floating around. Everything promising something different, but wait, not available for your region. There are so many channels, more than your current DTH, but one second, WHAT exactly are thos channels. No list? For all I care, they could be endless streams of Doordarshan and ETV regional ones. (Please repeat the question I asked in point 1 here again)
Makes me wonder, do they really want to sell anything or Anil just made this out for fun, having a roaring time watching realtime website logs seeing people getting stuck and frustrated in the maze.
© Shantanu Goel | Do They Really Know How To Sell Something In India?—-
If you liked this post, then you can Subscribe to my feed
This post has 8 comments
August 26th, 2008
Add a few more to the iPhone negatives.
- no forwarding of messages allowed.
- no BT transfers
- to change battery need to send back to apple.
August 26th, 2008
yeah, thats true..infact there are many more (no tethering, no multitasking, no copy paste…the list goes on…) But I made this post because earlier I thought that their marketing team was really great to have sold so much of such a lacking product. But after seeing their ads here, I changed my mind. I thought ok, atleast when they are making an ad, they should hit on points that they can back up with something..That ad is just ridiculuous.
August 27th, 2008
Heh, it’s the sad truth. =(. Also, from a medical perspective, roughly 20% of Indian ayurvedic medicine has heavy metal contamination (mainly lead and mercury). India really needs to get its act together on numerous frontiers.
August 28th, 2008
@rishi: oh thats news for me..I used to think that the issue of medicines containing harmful substances was with allopathic ones only. Will do some searching on ayurvedic ones as well then, if possible, to see which ones to skirt around.
You are right, we need to have better acts for consumer protection, especially for products where lives are involved.
August 31st, 2008
“all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone”
crap crap ..
though safari is good but not enough to boom iphone
What should i say you already described so much and commented so much here
http://www.honeytechblog.com/top-7-reasons-to-say-no-to-iphone-3g/
Hey Big Tv got Alexa of 33503 besides the fact that it launches recently and domain age of 12/2007
check here
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.bigtv.co.in
whereas dishtv have Alexa of 38155.
September 6th, 2008
Quite a thoughtful post, dint try iphone yet, but can surely add my views on BIG TV venture by Reliance.
The marketing ideas could have been more logical, genuineness was quite missing in the campaign led by Anil Ambani!
September 7th, 2008
I can’t talk much about Satellte TV’s coz’ if my company finds out.. i’ll be in trouble.. but then..
Watch it, Big TV is really become big if rivals don’t step up. Leave aside marketing, from a software perspective, they have got an edge.Also, from infrastructure point of view, they are way ahead.
From retail selling to having much more bandwidth and more number of transponders… they have already a long term solution in place..
Just watch out for Bharti, that’ll pose a threat to Reliance as they’ll soon come with Triple Play..
Rest, just see how TV viewing will change drastically with in next 2 years.. as the preparations are going on in full swing
September 7th, 2008
by the way, bharti is supposed to continue with Madhavan and Vidya Balan for its Satellite TV advertising campaign..
Add a comment