Zong M9 - What's the Real Plan?

There's something that caught my eye about a recent marketing campaign by a Telecom giant. I studied marketing for four years. It's true that we mostly concentrated on traditional channels of marketing.

It's only recently that I've started seeing a great number of local brands who have taken their marketing to the online platform. I'm sure we have all heard the sales pitch about the benefits of online marketing until now. Indeed it has been getting so repetitive that I can probably write my own version of it.

Recently though there has a been a wave of online marketing used by, you guessed it, Zong. It seems as though everywhere I browse online, something or other by Zong appears; an online advertisement, a Facebook fan page, a leaked commercial or even one of those animations with a stick figure and all.

Naturally, for an ardent web surfer, when this "Zong Mania" started appearing online, I wanted to know what it was. It turns out it was a promotional campaign for one of the packages that they have introduced into the Telecom services market.

Now, I've used Zong only once in my life for about a year. Even then I had happened to hear a number of comments about the network; how the service is bad; problems with voice clarity and other complaints like this. One thing though that I never heard the people complaining about was 'cost'.

It seems as though as far as mobile service providers go, Zong is definitely one of the cheapest. I have used Mobilink for many years as well, before I ultimately shifted to another number altogether. From what I know, Mobilink has been downright one of the most expensive service providers.

I used to charge my prepaid Jazz number almost every other day while Indigo users received the best benefits. That was mostly because there were not many package options to avail for prepaid users!

So out of curiosity, I looked into this new Zong M9 package. It was slightly confusing in the beginning to figure out what they were trying to say. But there were several upsides that I gathered from their website:

• It's a prepaid connection but they are kind of treating it like postpaid. They are charging a flat rate of Rs. 30 over which users have the option of enabling several different packages which give free SMS and discounted calls.
• There is a huge variety of packages to choose from. How is this different from what any other service provider has offered? These are all combined into package bundles. So what i gathered from these package bundles is that 2-3 services collectively make up one package bundle.

For example, the M9 2.2 per minute package you have the option of availing free SMS or free talk-time based on the way you are using your package daily. You have the choice, or at least, that is the concept behind the package.

It also turns out that after looking into the packages and some of their social media efforts they are trying to make their users connect to the 'What's Your Plan' tagline. The concept is that YOU, as a USER of ZONG, chooses whatever rates & packages YOU want.

Telecom empowerment anyone? I don't think any 'plan' of this sort has been offered by any other Telecom network. Apart from the fact that SMS and call deals are finally coming together under one package heading.

Every week or so for prepaid recharge, I know from personal experience how hard it is to remember 5-6 different codes for activating usage deals. The question is whether this will help Zong gain more followers and customers, and if so, we might want to ask Zong- What's YOUR Plan? zong m9