Authors: Robin Jeffrey
These contests were fought out in the tall buildings of Mumbai and the red sandstone offices of New Delhi. The huge advertising campaigns of Reliance, Hutch, Vodafone and Airtel made more and more people aware of mobile phones. And as awareness grew so did the search for customers, and for sales people capable of capturing customers, even in small towns and the countryside. (See
Illus. 8
).
The art of retail
How the phone found its way into more lives, and carried capitalist practices with it, was illustrated in the development of a Chennai-based business. According to the company history, D. Satish Babu (b. 1967) began his working life as a door-to-door salesman of vacuum cleaners. He got into mobile phones in 1997 when he began selling brand-name phones with post-paid connections door-to-door for a company called Skycell in Chennai. Phones and calls were expensive; brand-name phones were uncommon; and much of the trade was in the ‘grey market’—phones imported illegally from China (
Chapter 4
). One estimate was that ‘hardly one per cent of the mobile handsets were sold through regular retail’.
36
Sensing customers’ desire
to be gently inducted into the dark arts of mobile telephony, Satish Babu opened his own store in Chennai in 2000 under the name UniverCell. Intended as a place that explained the value of reliable brands, it aimed to provide customers with a comfortable environment to learn about phones and, more important, to try them out.
37
‘He wanted to provide the ambience’, a company vice-president explained. ‘He wanted to provide touch and feel, and he wanted to provide original mobiles with warranty’.
38
In 2007, UniverCell had grown to eight stores. Between 2007 and 2009, Indian phone connections doubled from 206 million to 430 million. UniverCell helped to lead this expansion. By 2010, it had 300 stores in south India and outlets in Mumbai and New Delhi; it claimed an annual turnover of Rs 600 crores (US $120 million), monthly sales of 200,000 phones and a sales staff of 1,500.
39
The mobile phone trained people in practices of international consumerism. UniverCell’s first slogan had been, ‘Where you buy matters’, an attempt to reassure sceptical customers of the reliability that they could expect from a spacious, sparkling showroom and polite staff who taught people how to use branded phones that were sold with receipts and warranties. As the company expanded, it took this shopping experience—similar to what one might expect in Sydney or San Francisco—to 170 towns across south India. The slogan also changed to ‘the mobile expert’. The assumption was no longer that people needed assurance that the phone would work—or be repaired if it did not—but rather that here was a place where one model could be compared with another and all the latest features could be tried and explained by trained staff.
The need for trained workers led to the diffusion of basic familiarity with mobile phones to millions of people. More confident customers became interested in more sophisticated technology. Sales people had to be prepared. An executive of UniverCell explained:
There is a rigorous training program that goes on which is done partly by the manufacturers like Nokia, Sony, Samsung. They come and train our people. Second is [that] our own people train, get trained and they go about training the people in the showrooms … We have 380 touch points. Now, you would call [those sales people to] the hub and … give the training. And we also use video conferencing in a big way to train our people. … Once in a month, there is a video conference happening where you list … the focus models. What are the price ranges to focus on? Why are we focusing on certain models? What is our position of supply of stocks? For example, in a price segment, if you want a touch phone with a megapixel camera of, let us say, Samsung and that is not available, what is the alternate phone the staff can focus on? All this is done through rigorous training. And it is done frequently so there is a drill down … to the last person. First, the [state] heads are trained, then the zonal managers, then the area managers, then the showroom managers, then the front end staff and so on. So this process is a well oiled machinery that keeps training and churning.
40
Such systematic planning
resonated well with a key element of global capitalism—standardisation.
41
What had worked for Henry Ford and the American automobile industry was relevant to India’s cell-phone growth.
42
Standardisation enabled global integration, and, like standardised components, which were easier to replace, so too the standardisation of skills made trained staff interchangeable. The mobile phone industry, led by global corporations, introduced new work practices that were shared across the industry and increasingly took root at the local level (
Chapter 4
). By 2010, UniverCell’s stores covered most south Indian towns with populations of 200,000 people or more. The next level was to take the showroom and the customer experience to ‘Tier 4’ towns with populations of 100,000 to 200,000.
The difference in the treatment of customers was one of the striking features of the expansion of mobile telephony. Economy, comfort and education were all part of the mix. Curious citizens increasingly had to choose what qualities they valued and to weigh up the advantages of becoming a practising global consumer. In south India from 2000, Satish Babu’s UniverCell offered customers friendly instruction and the chance to compare phone models. In north India, no chain quite like UniverCell emerged in the first decade after mobile telephony burgeoned. Instead, the big manufacturers—Nokia, Samsung, Sony-Ericsson and various makes of ‘Indian brands’—either set up their own shops or induced existing outlets to add an agency for mobile handsets to their existing business. A few examples illustrate the process.
In November 2008, a young
MBA from Allahabad University, backed by his family, paid a security of Rs 350,000 to Nokia to acquire an agency for their phones in a neighbourhood shopping centre in Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. He opened a small store from which he sold Nokia phones and acted as an agent for Bharti Airtel. He combined the cell phone business with an agency for motor scooters. People who wanted one item, he said, were often interested in the other. Nokia widely marketed the virtues of their phones and paid him interest on his security deposit. There were other Nokia dealers in Allahabad, and there were many rival providers of mobile-phone cards and plans, but Airtel was the largest. In March 2009, after being open for four months, business was good. The shop looked reliable and reassuring, and the shelves were well-stocked with shiny boxes and fancy new phones. Nokia representatives visited regularly, and Nokia supplied additional stock as phones were sold. The young manager-owner said he sold about two dozen phones a week. Perhaps typifying the way many young people took up the technology, he said he had learned technical aspects of cell phones, not from industry training courses or tech-school study but from articles on the Web. In one respect, his was an ‘old’ business: his family were Guptas, traditionally associated with commerce. The young manager-owner said that he could have had a place in the family business, but it was better to work for oneself. He had chosen to sell phones and scooters because he perceived these as products whose popularity was likely to grow.
The cell-phone industry opened up new occupations and drew millions of people into unprecedented connections with corporations and governments. A second Nokia dealer in Allahabad in 2009 hinted at such possibilities. ‘Rama Telecom and Photostat’ had begun in 1998 as a business-supplies centre offering stationery, photocopying and express mail services. Adding cell phones responded to the interests of customers. At Rama Telecom and Photostat, Nokia was the phone on sale, but the service provider was Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), the government company. The business was owned by a Yadav, and a young Muslim dealt with customers at the front counter.
43
Categorised as OBCs (Other Backward Classes), Yadavs in the past were not regarded as people of commerce. Similarly, Muslims in north India since the Partition had been disproportionately artisans, peasants and workers. The Yadav-Muslim combination in the shop provided a cameo of new possibilities.
For customers, the new showrooms and mobile phone shops were places where they became familiar with the technical and social practices of a consumer-oriented world. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, even rural people were increasingly exposed to these practices. UniverCell executives explained that during festival times such as Diwali, country folk came to town and sometimes included the showroom experience as a feature of their holiday outing.
44
These interactions introduced people to new ways of life and purchasing practices. From Chennai to Banaras, sales people developed appropriately local ways of engaging with those who wished to buy a phone. And for many, a phone had become ‘the first white good [major appliance] that a consumer buys, even before a bicycle’.
45
Pivotal in assisting
local entrepreneurs to seduce India’s new consumers into the wonderland of mobile telephony were the sales promoters—spreading the word and explaining how to use the new device. This legion of missionaries propagated the message that mobile phones could and should be used by everyone, not only the privileged classes. Advertising campaigns celebrated lifestyles associated with mobile phones; but it was sales people down to the level of small shopkeepers who explained how a phone could be used in daily lives and suggested even to poor people that they too could be ‘valued customers’, entitled to a mobile-phone lifestyle. Small shopkeepers, and sales advisors employed by mobile phone companies, were trained in the ‘art of retail’ to educate first-time users about the world of mobile products and services.
The story of Ravi Varma, owner of a successful mobile phone shop near Banaras’s busy Lanka crossing, captures the evolution of the industry from post-paid to pre-paid services.
46
His entry into the mobile phone business in 2001–2 was through Reliance mobiles as it tried to penetrate local markets. Ravi exemplified Reliance’s vision of large markets in small towns, but it was a vision that remained largely unrealised until the arrival of prepaid cards. During the early days, handsets were very expensive (about Rs 21,000 each), and the post-paid billing system was costly and unreliable. Even the sweeteners offered by Reliance to attract new customers, such as free talk-time as part of the postpaid bundle, were insufficient. Customers rarely made additional calls, fearing the unpredictably high cost of post-paid calls. But the real problem was more practical. ‘Reliance’, Ravi said, ‘found it almost impossible to chase up their post-paid clients for their overdue payments’. Reliance managed to retain its hard-won post-paid clients, and once pre-paid schemes were introduced in 2003, the company shifted strategy. Ravi explained:
The trick of Reliance was to turn all the post-paid connections to prepaid, because they [Reliance] realised that people will not pay the money on the post-paid bills, so in order not to lose clients they kept their connections and converted these people to pre-paid.
Converting pre-paid was not
simply a pragmatic move. For many consumers this was a transformative event. And it enabled people like Ravi to turn their fledgling ventures into profit-making businesses. Once the pre-paid mobile system began, people felt liberated, Ravi said; they could easily choose, and change, service providers and networks. They also realised that they could readily monitor their own call costs. At the same time, the prices of handsets were dropping, aided by the increased flow of Chinese mobiles and competition amongst service providers. For Ravi as a sales agent, abandoning his Reliance affiliation in favour of Samsung was a smart move; he soon became a ‘privileged’ Samsung outlet and adopted a new model to sell phones:
I only had to invest Rs 50,000 and they gave everything—so I made my shop nice with air-conditioning. Also what was really good is that you only need to sell 60 per cent Samsung handsets and the rest whatever you want. But in practice this is not a problem as long as you achieve the target given by the company—which is about 250/300 sets per-month, and I sell around 1,200 sets in total per-month.
47
Ravi’s shop was spacious, with 12 glass display-cases sporting over 100 handsets, ranging from international brands, (e.g., Samsung, Sony, LG) to Indian ones, such as Fly, Micromax and Karbonn. (See
Illus. 10
). There were simple handsets as well as the top-of-the-range. The walls were decorated with posters of Bollywood stars advertising networks, brand-name handsets and various talk-time schemes. But according to Ravi, it was not about advertising; it was about trust:
If I want to sell I can do it because we are the first point of contact with the customer and the relationship between me and customer is local. If I recommended a handset to clients, they will take [it] because if anything happens they will come back to me.
Ravi’s clientele were mostly from the Lanka locality; many were students from the nearby Banaras Hindu University. Unlike other smaller mobile businesses that sold mainly mobile accessories, SIM cards and recharge coupons, Ravi’s shop primarily dealt with handsets. The success of the shop rested on Ravi’s experience and management skills, but equally important were the impeccably dressed and well-mannered sales promoters who arrived at the shop every morning at 8 am to begin their day. (See
Illus. 9
).