Although I’m a diehard Airtel loyalist- back in my Patiala days, I was a beneficiary of the price war dividend- I criticised them a few months ago for not doing what a tyro like Spice was doing. Now, I’m going to ask if they’ve dropped the innovation ball altogether.
Their last major new VAS was the portfolio tracker they launched ast May. Since then, all they’ve done is expanded the range of smartphones Blackberry is available on and introduced GSM based Fixed Wireless. Considering Blackberry is shortly ending its exclusive tieup with Airtel, and that Reliance and Tata Indicom have had fixed wireless for donkey’s years, that’s not very impressive. Even in pricing, the lifetime prepaid offer was really a reaction to Tata Indicom.
In the meanwhile, Hutch has come up with a stunning funda: Fun Cards, with which you can install ringtones and ringback tones the way you do a prepaid recharge. That’s a customer delighting product for sure- just buy and scratch a card, instead of going through a long list, or navigating IVRS menus, or paying for premium SMSs.
You could argue about whether the product actually makes business sense. Hutch has been facing a retailer boycott since it slashed retailer margins on prepaid recharge cards. Fun card margins are probably higher, but there’s no guarantee that they won’t erode either, or that this will mollify pissed-off retailers who get most existing business through recharges. Not only that, if Hutch miscalculates the popularity of a particular Fun Card, it’s got a lot of dead inventory sitting in it’s supply chain- not really a problem when your distribution model for ringtones is purely electronic.
Of course, the possible weakness of Fun Cards as a product doesn’t justify Airtel failing to innovate anywhere else.
[…] Three months ago, I blogged about Airtel not coming up with anything new, and wondered if they’d been left behind in the innovation race. Very embarassing, considering all that they’ve been doing the past month. […]