“When I reach, I will give you a missed call Madam,” my driver tells me. This strange form of communication between us has been the practice for a couple of years.
Not saying anything says a lot; that is, by just dialling my number and disconnecting before I pick it up, he conveys the message that he has reached. This also happens between my maid and me, and among my friends and even office colleagues. It’s just a very convenient, yet personal, way of conveying that you want to communicate, or have reached somewhere. But what is the larger significance of this missed call phenomenon? And how can marketers use it to their advantage?
Cell-phone user base
India is the second largest base for cell phone subscribers (over a billion), with the leader being China. In 2015, India overtook the US, where mobile services are highly affordable. But that may not be the case in India where, according to recent Census data, 75 per cent of the population earns less than ₹5,000 ($75) a month.
In spite of this, mobile usage has picked up exponentially, thanks to the crash in the prices of mobile handsets. It may be surprising to know that even US-based Apple is planning to recycle its phones and sell them in India at a much lower cost.
The second reason for the pick-up in mobile phone usage could be the ‘missed call’ phenomenon, one that exists in other countries too. For example, there is the ‘miskol’ in the Philippines, the ‘beep’ in Africa, ‘memancing’ in Indonesia, and the ‘flashcall’ in Pakistan. In the era of Facebook and WhatsApp, one can connect freely without using talktime, but that requires smartphones, access to mobile internet and technology skills.
With a large number of Indians still using feature phones and not smartphones, the missed call is an economical and wide-reaching mechanism of communication.
Marketing campaign
The ‘missed call’ enables businesses to run marketing campaigns. A consumer calls a number, hangs up and then receives a call back or an SMS sharing the information requested. While big companies use it to capture consumer contacts to solicit business or relationship building at a later stage, smaller, localised initiatives and firms — such as cancer-detection centres, state government tuberculosis prevention campaigns, gyms, private schools and colleges, NGOs, and the like — have a phone number to give a missed call to featured prominently in their print and TV ads.
The PMO has used this missed call strategy effectively — if one wants to listen to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest ‘Mann ki Baat’ speech, one just has to give a missed call to a number and you can hear the whole message. There are other organisations, such as the Employees Provident Fund, which has started a missed-call service for its 35 million contributing members, which enables them to track their account balance.
India’s largest bank — State Bank of India (SBI) — launched SBI Quick last year. It is a facility which allows you to find out your bank balance and other account-related details on your registered mobile phone. On giving a missed call to the well-publicised SBI number, you can get the information you were looking for.
Indian phenomenon
Missed call marketing is primarily an Indian phenomenon, even though call rates are the cheapest in India when compared to other emerging markets. More than cost, it is a cultural phenomenon. Some of it has to do with literacy, as it is easier to give a missed call than send a text in English. People wanting to talk less on the phone could also be a reason, with data taking over a part of interpersonal communication.
One successful example of this is Nestlé’s Bunyad. Bunyad is an iron-rich product specially for school-going children to prevent iron deficiency. The brand offered free talk-time to anybody who gave a missed call and listened to the Bunyad message. Now, they have a database of these listeners at their disposal and can use it to engage them further.
But India is only the tip of the emerging iceberg. There is more action here because the active mobile base is so large. Other factors involved are: the fact that there is no cost associated with giving a missed call, it’s easy and fast, it’s the simplest call to action, it is universally understood and accepted, there is no app to install and no account to create, and, above all, it is a human-powered ecosystem that’s already in place.