Vodafone, the mobile service brand of Vodafone Essar, has emerged as the "Most Admired Mobile Service Brand Online" in India followed by Tata Indicom and Aircel in an pan-India survey conducted by Drizzlin Media. The survey shows that Reliance Mobile emerged as the least admired brand.
Drizzlin Media, a Branding 2.0 consultancy, audited over 1,600 relevant conversations of the 7,000 conversations sampled around India's top 10 telecom brands to identify the most admired mobile service 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, Tariffs/billing, Ads/promotions, Customer Care Service, Network Coverage and Brand Affinity.
The Telecom brands covered for the purpose of the survey are Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Tata Indicom, Aircel, Reliance Mobile, BSNL Mobile, MTNL, Spice Mobile and Loop Mobile.
The Methodology of the survey based on 6 venue types were chosen for the purpose of the survey which were: Internet Blogs, Micro blogs, Twitter, Social Networks like Facebook and Orkut, Forums, Video Sharing: YouTube and Consumer review sites like Mouthshut.
For each of the venues, Goggle searches were conducted with advanced operators. For Orkut.com, however, site-specific searches were conducted, owing to the private nature of the social network 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 Service Brand Online”. Admiration scores were also calculated for each individual parameter across the 10 brands to identify the top brands. The score was calculated by assigning weights, based on conversations around the parameter, for each brand.
The Key Findings of The Survey-:
• 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.
• 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 honours 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. 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.
