I swear on the digital gods that I intended no pun with the title of the post.
News has it that BPL Mobile as a brand has ceased to exist and will now be known as Loop mobile. The reason is to build a better brand image among the youth. “‘Get in the Loop’ was our way of refreshing the brand to make it contemporary for the youth,” says Arif Ali, head, brand and communications, Loop Mobile. “As we wanted to transform BPL further to appeal to this segment, we chose a word from our own tagline, as it generated high recall and popularity, according to our research.”
Get in the Loop was campaign launched by BPL back in 2007 and had spent quite a deal of effort and money into marketing the brand then among youth. It had even extended the campaign online with getintheloop.in a microsite with which users could get their photographs on city billboards. The site though defunct now did generate some amount of buzz then.
With newer entrants in the market like Virgin and Idea pushing hard with some innovative marketing and branding campaigns, perhaps BPL needed to review its positioning. From the experience shared by my friends who use BPL mobile, the pricing always seemed to be the biggest pull for them to choose BPL’s services. However, it seems the pressure exerted by the new market movers besides the heavyweights like Airtel and Vodafone was too much for the oldest and the only surviving mobile player of the 90s.
We also have talks of number portability doing rounds these days a lot, which is sure to bring all the mobile players in a level playing field. In such a scenario, it is perhaps obvious to expect price wars among the players leaving BPL with no special edge over its rivals as price was always its strong point. With the increased emphasis on Mobile VAS and a lot of such add ons gaining ground as mobile becomes a mainstream media, players like BPL had to look beyond the touch point of price in the changing market. This move certainly seems in line with the thought.
Till now the only Value Add that BPL has introduced is the local search service that they introduced first and then tied up with Yahoo for their Onesearch service later. Given the existing dynamics of the market, BPL perhaps need to pull things up further and have more features that users can associate to this new and improved brand image. On the other hand, it also seems a strategic shift away from what would have seemed its ideal users, the cost conscious middle class. Perhaps the thought that such a market can’t drive the VAS game as much the youth could have also played its part in this move.
For the sake of completion, the brand will hence be called Loop and is pakaged in four attractive young colours. They symbolise freshness, vibrancy, energy, excitement and a cool quotient.
An important point that I almost missed was that this change is only in the Mumbai spectrum. Which means any of the marketing methods planned to use will be restriced to local media and straightaway removes TV out of the media used. Given the precision of targeting that the web gives, perhaps BPL or Loop should engage the Internet and social media for some innovative and targeted brand building initiatives. In the meanwhile I just hope they don’t go about this change in the same way as Vodafone did after it took over Hutch.
