Adgully Exclusive | Our products should redefine life in every way: Karbonn Mobile's Shashin Devsare

Karbonn mobiles, which recently entered the market in 2009, was launched with an aim to meet the needs of consumers' life in every way with their unique product portfolio. With a lot of firsts to their credit, they have achieved a platform and have become a preferred choice for consumers today.

Karbonn was launched keeping in mind various factors like design aesthetics, target audience, location specifics and expected feedback on the product range. Being an Indian mobile company and with aggressive competition from international brands that had strong hold in the market, they have been able to penetrate deeper than mobile brands with conventional marketing formats.

To know more insights about Karbonn mobiles, Adgully caught up with Shashin Devsare, Executive Director, Karbonn Mobiles. | By Aanchal Kohli [aanchal(at)adgully.com]

On asking about marketing and branding strategies, Devsare said, "Our brand philosophy is that our products should redefine life in every way. We first made our product available in Tier 2 & 3 cities through distributors and local retailers."

Further elaborating his point, he said, "After establishing a strong hold in the semi urban market, we went ahead with launching our products in metros as well and created a visibility amongst consumers."

As per the Gartner report "Market Share: Mobile Communication Devices by Region and Country, 3Q11," Karbonn Mobiles is the top most Indian Mobile Brand.

Value for money and youth are the key factors driving positioning of all the mobile brands in the market so with respect to their competition they wanted to be very different in terms of positioning. He says, "Our brand positioning is "Redefining youth". Karbonn mobiles with stunning aesthetics with unrivalled innovation is creating a new definition i.e. youth and our target audience are people who are young at heart irrespective of age, status etc."

Karbonn has been a market leader in "firsts' wherein initiatives by the group is followed in by the competition. Innovations like popularizing Dual-SIM phones, providing affordable android phones and others prove a point of the business leadership of the brand.

Sharing the USP of the company, Devsare explained that while other competitors harp either on branding or product range, Karbonn keeps a healthy balance between the two and has one of the most consistent offerings in the market which focuses on product and the brand thus achieving a greater consumer connect.

Apart from value for money and committed after sales service, the core value that drives the brand and also sets it apart from the competition is the cutting edge technology which seems to be the focus of the company and also providing technologically advanced products.

In terms of association, Karbonn is associated with the most popular sports of the subcontinent, which has proved to be a great platform for the brand in terms of reaching out to the audience and giving the brand an opportunity to connect with the consumers at a massive scale. Also, sponsoring entertainment properties like Star Screen Awards, Sach ka Saamna, enhanced the brand's popularity and announced Karbonn Mobiles' intentions of climbing to the top.

This year the company is planning to step up their marketing expenditure by 30% of Rs. 150 crores, which was their spend last year, i.e. this year it would be to the tune of 195 crores. This money will be spent on product development and brand promotions. "We are targeting to change the face of the Indian mobile phone market with our quality handsets and intend to be amongst the top 3 mobile phone brands by next fiscal," Devsare added.

As told by Davsare, they have recently forayed into the smart phone segment and the response is overwhelming and also introduced a complete new range of smart feature phone. The focus will be on OS vendors to develop unrivalled technology for the consumers for entry into tablet segment, Also there is an active engagement planned with mobile chipset vendors.

He says, "Also we are focusing on creating a demand driven market by launching about 3 to 4 models every quarter. This business model enables the brand to understand consumer needs and offer products specifically suited to them."

India's mobile handset market is quite cluttered with international brands having a strong hold on the consumers. Creating your own place in such kind of a market is not that easy where first you face aggressive competition, second you have consumers who are loyal to their brand and third meeting the ever changing demands of Indian consumers.

Speaking about the steps taken as per the challenges, he said, "After realizing all these challenges we devised a strong strategy to enter into the market and built a strong, dedicated and loyal distribution channel. We targeted consumers in tier 2 and 3 cities who are price conscious and ready to experiment with a new brand provided with best features in low prices."

Besides the ground level approach the company also invested heavily in research and development to churn out innovative and unique features in sync with market trends and also in various associations, consumer promotions etc. With a wide product range, all below Rs 10,000, Karbonn enjoys being the brand which has one of the lowest defect ratio in the country.