Airtel is mostly known as Bharti Airtel Limited Company, and considered to be India’s most famous and popular telecommunication services. Its headquarter is located in New Delhi, India. Basically, Airtel is the integrated service providers, which is tasked with work and projects of the operating telecommunication offerings and services in the Indian subcontinent. The business services of the company include all mobile services, Telemedia services and enterprise services. The overall mobile services of the company include fixed-wireless services and other services that make the use GSM network technology necessary over the main telecommunication circles across the country (Airtel, 2018).
With the presences of Pan-India, Airtel is considered as the established player for providing the 3G services, and is aggressively planning for rolling out in the market its 4G services. Usually these services are available in big cities and metros such as Mumbai and Bangalore. Airtel also provide the world class and one of the best landline telephone services and broadband offerings along with enterprise units over 95 cities across India. Some of its competitors are; Idea, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, Vodafone, Tata Docomo, and Reliance Communication ltd (Bhasin, 2018).
Products in Marketing Mix of Airtel
Airtel is the company, who provide the broad array of the services and products. For retaining new and potential customer to the maximum number, Airtel has worked hard to offer many services and products, to keep and maintain its customer base. There is a list of its product, which are as follows;
• BWH- Blackberry Wireless Handheld
• Pre-paid services of Airtel
• Post-paid services of Airtel
• VAD- Value Added Services, such as immediate balance inquiry, recharge facility available 24/7, caller-line identification, MMS- multimedia message services, Call hold and call wait, Live portal of Airtel, and Caller divert
• Information services based on SMS
• Ring tones, hello tones
• Services of voice mail
• Tunes offers (Hello and ring tunes)
• Enterprise solutions
• Solution of post-pay easy bill payments (Airtel, 2018).
Price in Marketing Mix of Airtel
Pricing strategy used by Airtel is competitive, just like its competitors or other providers of networking services, due to the competition level exist in this industry. However, it also use flexible mechanism of pricing, and provide it as the service, depends on prevailing market situation. For example, when there is a news of relax taxation in the company, it reduced the prices of all affected products. Airtel also introduced the new smart strategy with the name “make my plan” for consumers who wants to modify and set their plans according to their needs and wants. This was one of the good strategy adopted by Airtel (MbaSkool, 2018).
Place in Marketing Mix of Airtel
Market penetration of Airtel in the whole India is very impressive due to its network and services, which can be easily available in the remote regions of India. Currently, the gross subscriber has pass over 200 million marks, whereas aggregate wireless subscriber for the GSM, WLL, and CDMA are around 162 million. It is clear that the Airtel’s customer bases is very strong and powerful across India. It is worth mentioning that Airtel added millions of network’s line annually (Bhasin, 2018).
Airtel really enjoys the well distributed and established network of the distributors, which include other businesses such as, chemist and groceries outlets. The one major things which made the Airtel a strong force to the reckon in the industry of telecommunication in Africa and India, is its strategy for taking initiatives and emerge as the winner. It is successful in managing the deal to buy the Tata and Zain steel in Kuwait, making it the top wireless carrier across the globe in terms of subscription (Gupta, 2011).
• Broader distribution network as comparison to its competitors.
• Widespread network, which bring several consumers on daily basis.
• Airtel is the fourth largest leading mobile operator across the globe and exist in 20 countries (Bhasin, 2018).
Promotion in Marketing Mix of Airtel
Airtel engages itself in the aggressive promotion and marketing strategies ranging from the conventional print media to the digital media marketing covering all social networks. However, the recent rebranding of the company has shown its efforts got bombed and also not received the positive response. Airtel also engages the large scale print and TV advertising. It also frequently use the big and famous celebrities for endorsement, to attract wide range of consumers. Airtel also managed to develop its own signature tunes with the help of Oscar winning singer and musician, A.R Rehman, and it became one of the famous and downloaded tunes across India (Annual report, 2016).
It is quite interesting to observe that although such redundant activities such as providing screensavers and wallpapers to the computer users, proved the effective marketing approach and strategy. It also offer special discounts to its subscribers. Apart from this, it also hired many celebrities like Amitabh Bachan, Vidya Balan, as the brand ambassadors. Sachin Tendulkar, who is considered as the cricket God, was also hired for the advertisement campaigns, as he got a large fan followings. There are major advantages of going regional for Airtel with its advertisements. Some salient points Airtel consider in its promotional activities are; (Bhasin, 2018)
• Use of BTL and ATL activities.
• Making an effort for going regional.
• Rebranding efforts- although got failed.
• Good reputation, word of mouth, brand image and goodwill after Vodafone.
Thus, Airtel consider all the marketing mix factors into consideration while maintaining its position in the market, and retaining new consumers. This is why, it is growing rapidly and will become the market leader in the world (Annual report, 2016).
References
Airtel, 2018. About Us. [Online], Available at: https://www.airtel.in/about-bharti/about-bharti-airtel, [Accessed on: 13th June, 2018].
Annual Report, 2016. Annual report of Airtel. [Online], Available at: https://www.airtel.in/airtel-annual-report-2016-17/download-center.html, [Accessed on: 13th June, 2018].
Bhasin, H. 2018. Marketing mix of Airtel. [Online], Available at: https://www.marketing91.com/marketing-mix-airtel/, [Accessed on: 13th June, 2018].
Gupta, S. 2011. Marketing strategy of Airtel. [Online], Available at: https://issuu.com/sanjaykumarguptaa/docs/marketing-strategy-of-airtel, [Accessed on: 1th June, 2018].
MBA. S. 2018. Airtel marketing mix. [Online], Available at: https://www.mbaskool.com/marketing-mix/services/16969-airtel.html, [Accessed on: 1th June, 2018].