Vodafone:New pug n new promise

Like all companies aspiring towards globalisation, Vodafone India, too, has touched global shores – quite literally. In an ad for Vodafone’s customer care service, Vodafone India has used the picturesque Cape Town in South Africa as the setting, while even its brand embodiment – the pug – has been imported from Cape Town.According to Harit Nagpal, chief marketing officer, Vodafone India, this ad is the first instance of a customer care service being advertised in the telecom category in India. Why now? “Actually, we were waiting for a huge infrastructure to fall into place post the rebranding of Hutch into Vodafone,” says Nagpal. With Vodafone stores and mini-stores, mobile vans, self-service kiosks and thousands of customer service personnel in place, the timing is right, Nagpal asserts.

The Vodafone pug resurfaces after seven months (it was last leveraged in the Hutch-Vodafone transition ads in September 2007). The gap is smaller this time, as the pug is usually resurrected once in a year. As is known, the pug is used in the case of thematic brand communication, and generally not for individual products and services. Then why make an exception in an explicitly service based ad?Nagpal explains, “Customer care is the face of our brand, so in a sense, this aspect of Vodafone encompasses the entire brand.” Therefore, the pug.Rajiv Rao, group creative director, Ogilvy & Mather Mumbai, says the brief was simple: letting customers know that Vodafone is always ready and ‘happy to help’. “The ad is a metaphorical story of the brand and our customer,” he says. According to Nagpal, “This ad aims to urge customers to come to us.” This is because Vodafone launches new services from time to time, and in different subscriber cycles, and subscribers need to be made aware of these. “They need to know which services are useful to them, and a helping hand – our customer care – can do that,” he explains.

"We hope the services will be as good as the ads"