Is Jio greatest marketing campaign in last decade?
Lunched in 2016, Jio broke the dominance of Airtel and Vodafone and in half-decade, became the largest telecom service provider across India with more than 434 million customers.
From 0 customers to 434million paying customers in 5 years.
That's massive.
It was a carefully planned and executed move by one of the biggest companies in the world, Reliance pvt. Ltd.
Interesting thing is it was done as a freebie campaign.
Free sim card with unlimited data and voice call for 6 months.
Churn rate was massive. Over 3 billion sim cards were issued and mostly people used it for 6 months and threw it away.
And yet, company has placed bet on the fact that when freebies are gone, they will dominate the market.
It happened exactly like that.
Jio held on to the offers until opposition had massive losses and customers were fleeing like bees.
To curb losses, competition made cuts on services resulting in even faster erosion.
Industry had collapsed at Jio welcome. Over $15 billion in losses in 18 months for Jio.
Jio remained calm and slowly started raising prices for the existing prices. Since then, they broken even with expenses and now they have recorded profit for 15th successive quarter.
That's incredible and to the perfect plan executed by Jio and team.
How many big companies have came to existence like this? Not many come to mind.
Obviously, Jio has debts and infrastructure to worry about still they are sustainable and one of the biggest provider of internet on earth.
Internet is cheapest in India due to Jio and their bold act.
Entire digital economy is based on services provided by Jio. Very powerful position to be in as a company.
It goes without saying, Jio has political influences as well. Still, Great learning.
There are obvious drawbacks to this however, as a professional, I see a great campaign with objectives achieved.