Vodafone Idea Provides Industry Unique Offers, Yet Behind Jio and Airtel

Why is it Happening?

The first and the most obvious reason is slightly cheaper offerings from Jio and Airtel. We are not saying Vi’s prepaid offers are not ‘just’ or ‘fair’ for their price. While they are just fine, no one can deny that they are still a ‘little’ expensive than Jio’s and Airtel’s offerings.

The telco’s network reach is good, but it is not as good as Jio’s. Jio is targeting rural India, where not just Vi but Airtel lags as well.

Let’s address the elephant in the room. While the above-mentioned reasons are ‘contributing factors’ to Vi losing out on subscribers, no one really likes to talk about the prime reason why Vi is falling behind the other private operators.

It is Vi’s reducing brand image.

Vi’s Falling Brand Image

Vodafone and Idea merged to form ‘Vodafone Idea Limited’, now ‘Vi’. Subconsciously, that sets a negative image for the company in the minds of the users. It becomes very easy to think that Vodafone and Idea had to merge because they just weren’t good enough.

After the merger, things didn’t rapidly change for the telco. Even though it saw a positive curve in its subscriber addition for a brief period, it has been struggling financially for way too long.

That’s what motivated Vi to come out with industry-unique offers. It wanted to gain a larger market share to increase its revenues. But even that might have worked against the company. Indians could see the desperate nature of Vi to survive from the offers it rolled out.

But here’s the good thing for Vi.

India is a massive market, and a huge part of it is still in the 2G era. But they will soon look to upgrade to 4G. All that Vi has to do is figure out a way to attract this set of subscribers.

Even though users appreciate the unique offers from Vi, a lot of them don’t really need that. Users are content with the kind of benefits they get from Airtel and Jio for a lesser price.