Case Study: Virgin Mobile India- Building a youth brand in a youthful country

India has one of the youngest populations in the world with a median age of 24 years. Virgin Mobile, the telecommunications operator, realized that with much discussion of ‘40 as the new 20’, India’s twenty-somethings were being squeezed out. The fact that there wasn’t a mainstream youth brand in one of the youngest countries of the world was seen as an opportunity by the brand. 

In India, all telecom brands were trying to be everything for everybody. Moreover there appeared to be a standard formula to make the brand look young – make a group of youngsters jump in the sky and throw in a basketball or a guitar. The depiction of youth was less in motivation, more in imagery.

This was the real opportunity for Virgin Mobile in India – to give the Indian youth a brand that they can call their own;

To connect Virgin mobile to the youth of India rather than Indian ‘youthfulness’

The Indian Youth is Retrieving Self Space

Research, popular culture mapping and conversations with observers of change revealed that the youth in today’s India have cracked a unique route between tradition and modernity. They are challenging many of the old tenets of the traditional Indian way of life. As a generation they are critically aware that they cannot achieve desires through linear ways. For this generation therefore, small shortcuts are OK, some manipulation and a little bit of meanness is almost essential.

Who Else but a Brand Like Virgin?

It’s not that this new way of youth’s life was hidden from anybody in the society. But there was a social discomfort in facing it. Virgin is a courageous brand, it’s unafraid of bringing out what’s been brushed under the carpet by others. In the defined social and category context it looked like it was the destiny of Virgin Mobile as a brand to bring legitimacy to the new ways of youth life.

Virgin Mobile Exhorts Indian Youth to ‘Bypass the Firewall of Sanctions’

Virgin Mobile recognizes that today’s discontinuous desires need discontinuous ways to achieve them. Virgin exhorts Indian youth to be inventive in their ways, to find new ways around old things. In the same way as Virgin Mobile is challenging the category and its ‘done’ ways to unlock value for the youth. Virgin Mobile will be their partner in crime, and will exhort them to:

Bypass The Firewall Of Sanctions

Implementation
Creative Strategy

Our campaign creative told stories that were purposefully designed to bring out some of the grey areas in the public space. For the first time on national television, which seemed to have become the surrogate for India’s conscience, there were storylines and characters which were not whitewashed in goodness, e.g. showing a young girl pretending to have lesbian tendencies in front of her parents, only to manipulate them into letting her go to Goa with her boyfriend; how a young guy manages to bypass the hard-nosed traffic cop (in the Indian context often corrupt and seeking bribes) by making him talk to his father on the mobile phone. The father is no other than a friend of our protagonist. 

Media Strategy

To connect with youth at a limited budget we decided to target the media that they would have most affinity with. With a 6% share of expenditure, the brand managed to capture a 10% share of voice amongst the youth. While TV and radio was used, only shows on channels that they could connect with were chosen. Allocation to digital was twice that of the category average and outdoor’s share of budget was 18% compared to category average of 30%.

It was an extremely successful campaign where all metrics were met, and outperformed, when mapped against objectives. 

LESSONS LEARNED:

1. Building a young looking brand is different from building a brand for the youth. A real youth brand is not desperate to ‘look cool’. It is cool because of the things it does. We had to be young in motivation, not imagery.
2. Talking up versus talking down: Marketers and advertisers are always happy building brands that promise ‘empowerment’ or ‘liberation’. We realized that the youth of today’s India needed neither of these, as they were the ‘silver-spoon’ generation. All that they needed was a certain legitimatization of their way of life. They needed a brand to be their partner in crime and not sit on a pedestal.
3. Youth is not a species, just a new generation. We often tend to stereotype youth as those guys with tattoos and piercings all over their bodies and gel in their hair. In real life, youth is just another generation, dealing with its own set of issues. They are normal people.
4. Being brave: Youth brands need to have the courage to bring out what’s swept under the carpet. The locus of morality in India was changing. Virgin had to be brave to put it on the national television.