Kan Khajura Tesan – Classic example of fighting Rural Marketing challenges

Challenges in the rural marketing are never ending where the penetration of communication channels are limited. A very few households have television and for those who do there are two more filters for them the register a TVC – first availability of a stable network connection, Cable or DTH and secondly uninterrupted electricity. Either of the two are out of a Brand Manager’s scope and the brand is left helpless. FM Radio signals too in this area are weak and confined to limited cities which is way too less from that audience that any brand would like to reach in these two states. And unfortunately, print readership is amongst the lowest in the country as a result of low literacy rates in these states. If thats the kind of brief you deliver to any media or creative agency they might be on the verge of giving up, but not Lowe Lintas. Both Lowe Lintas and HUL went back to the drawing board and analysed the importance of these markets in and what they found was in congruence with the fact stated by the C. K. Prahalad and Stuart L. Hart that the fortune is at the bottom of the pyramid.

What Lowe Lintas, HUL and Hungama Digital came up with was one of the best marketing campaigns the world has ever seen.

180030000123 – That’s the toll free number Hindustan Unilever (HUL) is using to inject a dose of entertainment into the lives of millions of rural Indians and simultaneously talking about latest offerings to the entire population of Bihar and Jharkhand. Though KKT was piloted in Bihar in 2013, the idea has its roots in a ‘missed call’ campaign HUL conducted for Wheel, in 2012. Executed across the country, but focused on the ‘media dark’ central India belt, this campaign used All India Radio (AIR) to invite people to call a certain number and hang up, only to be called back and fed jokes in the romantic, ‘husband-wife’ space, one that Wheel operates in.

Well, if you are reading about this entire campaign for the first time or may be you are amongst the millions who have never experienced Kan Khajura Tesan that is because you have not been targeted for this campaign. Thats the precision with which the company has rolled out this super innovative campaign which turned out to be world’s best campaign this year by WARC. Accolades have not stopped coming for Kan Khajura Tesan from around the world making Lowe Lintas, Mumbai the best Creative Agency in the world for the year 2014 by WARC.

Kan Khajura Tesan claims to have over 12 million users (source: Ozonetel Systems, HUL’s cloud telephony platform for KKT). And the rate of growth has been rapid. In a presentation created for the Cannes Lions jury, KKT claimed eight million subscribers in six months. New users are being added at a staggering rate of 45,000-50,000 people a day, which is roughly over 1,800 new users every hour and 8-10 lakh unique consumers every three weeks. The campaign won four Lions (three Gold, one Bronze).