Emvies 2007: It’s raining colours for Reliance Communications

A major player in the CDMA market, Reliance Communications, was not known for its range of colour handsets until recently. At the Emvies Case Study Presentation round, OMS explained the strategy and execution involved in positioning Reliance Communications as a colour handset brand. The company had to face stiff competition from the increasing sales of colour handsets in the GSM market.

The project assigned to OMS was to make prospective buyers aware of the wide range of colour handsets from Reliance and bring Reliance colour phones to the 4: 6 industry ratio of B&W handsets to colour (Reliance’s ratio was 9:1). The media campaign by OMS last year took care of all that; it literally changed the dreary black and white picture of the company.

The agency went all out on its mission; it decided to lend colour to the mastheads of various publications, as these generally go unchanged for decades at a time and a change here would be noticed immediately. The masthead for ‘Dainik Bhaskar’ was coloured and so were those of ‘Divya Bhaskar’ (Gujarat), ‘Dainik Jagran’ (UP, Uttaranchal, Punjab, Bihar, MP, and Delhi), ‘Punyanagari’ (Maharashtra) and ‘Raj Express’ (Indore, Bhopal). The branding was below the masthead.

The strategy proved highly successful for the company as the sales of colour handsets shot up by 55 per cent in a period of five days. When the campaign execution reached the 45-day mark, sales increased by 250 per cent. The campaign, according to OMS executives, was seen and appreciated for its innovation by millions of newspaper readers.