Research Overview

• Understanding of the most admired brands through online ‘conversations’ existing on the web

• Insights on feedback being provided by consumers online around mobile service brands

• Understanding and exploring the opportunities that each of the brands have in exploring social media

MethodologyTo identify the most admired mobile telecom brand in the Indian Online Space. Admiration was defined as having a negative or a positive sentiment towards different aspects of the brand including:

• Product/services: This includes conversations related to the different packages and value added services that the brand provides

• Tariff/billing: Includes conversations which talks about the calling/sms rates for various offers and billing statements.

• Ads/promotions: Includes conversations around marketing campaigns and TVCs.

• Customer Service: This includes conversations where customers and prospective customers interacted with the brand

• Network Coverage: This deals with conversations regarding the coverage and network strength of the mobile service provider.

• Brand Affinity: Conversations where the brand has been praised without reference to any particular product or service

• The Telecom brands covered for the purpose of the survey are:• Airtel• Vodafone• Idea • Tata Indicom• Aircel• Reliance• BSNL Mobile• MTNL• Spice Mobile• Loop Mobile

Methodology

Methodology• 6 venue types were chosen for the purpose of the survey which is as

follows:– Blogs– Micro blogs: Twitter– Social Networks: Facebook and Orkut– Forums– Video Sharing: YouTube– Consumer review sites: Mouthshut

• Purely Complaint venues such as consumercomplaints.in and complaintsboard.com were ignored for the purpose of this survey, to avoid the negative skew in conversations

• Search terms were assigned to identify primary conversations for each of the brands.

Methodology: The Search TermsBrand Search Term

Airtel AirtelVodafone Vodafone India

Idea Cellular Idea Cellular

Tata Indicom Tata Indicom

Aircel AircelReliance Mobile Reliance Mobile

BSNL Mobile BSNL Mobile

MTNL MTNLSpice Mobile Spice Mobile

Loop Mobile Loop Mobile

Methodology• For each of the venues, Google searches were conducted with advanced

operators. For Orkut.com, however, site specific searches were conducted, owing to the private nature of the social network.

• The Universe of conversations considered for the purpose of the survey was 51,902,650.

• For each search term on each venue, the top 10 pages (with 10 results each) were audited to arrive at a total of 700 conversations per venue and a total of 7000 conversations.

• Of the 7000 conversations, relevant conversations (defined as ones expressing a personal opinion and showing an affinity towards one or multiple aspects of the brand) were identified. A total of 1631 conversations were thus identified.

Methodology• No brand initiated conversations and conversations pertaining to brand

products were considered for the purpose of the survey.  • The conversations identified fell in the following date range:Nov’2002 to

Aug’2009.The reason for such a broad time period was the fact that online conversations are here to stay and opinions presented 7 years back are as likely to influence opinions as a conversation that’s happened today.

• Each conversation audited was assigned a tonality score which was used to measure overall admiration for a brand. Negative tonality conversations were given a score of -1; Positive tonality conversations were given a score of +1.

• For conversations having multiple messaging parameters and therefore, multiple tonalities, an aggregate score was calculated based on the above method.

Methodology• For calculation of the overall admiration score, the sum of scores for each

brand was computed. A weightage was also assigned to the brands, based on Expected Conversations v/s Actual Conversations found. This weightage multiplied by the score of each brand, gave the final admiration score for each brand.

• The Overall score for the brand, determined the “Most Admired Mobile Telecom Brand Online”

• Admiration scores were also calculated for each individual parameter across the 10 brands to identify the top brands. This score was calculated by assigning weights, based on conversations around the parameter, for each brand.

The Top lines• Vodafone has been recognized as the most admired mobile service brand

online in India. This feat has been achieved through its strong branding and advertising efforts both in the offline and online mediums.

• The final rankings were determined as follows:

Brand Score

Vodafone 117.57

Tata Indicom 101.12

Aircel 59.76

BSNL Mobile 13.11

Airtel 9.71

Idea Cellular 3.73

MTNL 1.59

Spice Mobile -2.21

Loop Mobile -33.48

Reliance Mobile -47.9

The Top Lines• BSNL Mobile has scored highest in admiration for products and services while

Vodafone appeared at the bottom of the stack.

• In the context of Tariffs and Billing, BSNL Mobile took the top honors while Airtel lagged at the bottom.

• Vodafone scored the highest in terms of admiration for ads and promotional messaging. Here BSNL Mobile scored the lowest.

• Tata Indicom scored the highest in network coverage while Loop Mobile was the laggard in this space.

• MTNL scored the highest in customer service, while Vodafone was rated to have the worst customer service.

• Tata Indicom scores the highest in brand affinity whereas Aircel scores the lowest.

The Top Lines• While MTNL and BSNL Mobile scored high on individual parameters, people

talking of ads and promotions around brands was far higher, propelling active advertising brands like Vodafone, Aircel and Airtel to the top.

• Facebook, despite its phenomenal growth in the Indian online space, still does not see much activity by the telecom brands. Apart from Tata Indicom and Vodafone, all the other brands had negligible presence on the platform.

• 83% of the conversations, in which the gender could be clearly deduced, were found to be by men, while only 6% of these conversations were by women.

• The highest number of conversations was found to be around Ads and promotions, particularly on YouTube and Twitter.

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