Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel: MKT601, Semester 1

This comprehensive marketing plan analyzes Bharti Airtel, a major telecommunications company. The report begins with an executive summary, followed by an introduction outlining Airtel's history and market presence. A detailed situation analysis examines its current market position, including market share and key competitors. The SWOT analysis highlights the company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. The report then delves into the target market and positioning strategies, followed by an examination of the marketing mix, including product, price, promotion, and place. The financial and economic aspects are also discussed. The report concludes with recommendations for future strategies and growth, supported by references to relevant sources.

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 0
Title: Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel
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Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 1
Executive Summary
The telecommunication giant, core competitor, an Indian business conglomerate Bharti Airtel
has their headquarters in New Delhi, India. Mr. Sunil Bharti Mittal found it in 1976 with
operational nodes across Asia and Africa, with almost 18 countries in their chain. The pivotal
aim of this work is to analyze the corporate giant Bharti Airtel as per its current market
position, marketing strategies, financial, economic and social position of the company. This
report also discusses marketing techniques used by Airtel to defend an increase in market
shares and find the competitors of the Airtel and how it fights sportingly in the business
game. And most importantly, how it reacts to changing technological environment in the
Mobile research application domain.
Contents

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 2
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Situation Analysis......................................................................................................................3
SWOT Analysis.........................................................................................................................5
Target Market & Positioning.....................................................................................................7
Marketing Mix Strategy.............................................................................................................8
Conclusion................................................................................................................................10
Recommendations....................................................................................................................10
References................................................................................................................................12

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 3
Introduction
Bharti Airtel Limited Company is a famous corporate giant in the Indian Global
telecommunications Field since its advent on 7th of July, year 1995. It is a division of Bharti
Enterprises. The advent is from New Delhi, India, spanning across 20 countries belt to South
Asia and Africa. The Service landscape consists of GSM, 3G, 4G LTE, fixed line broadband
and voice which is company dependent. Airtel landscape also encompasses VoLTE
technology. Bharti Airtel has its name being the third largest Mobile Network giant in India
and famous as the Ninth largest successful network operations worldwide. The Number of
subscribers are booming number of 293.79 Million. Thus introducing India’s most recognised
brand with high ranking declared by Millwar Brown and WPP Ps.
Situation Analysis
The Incorporation of Bharti Airtel is earmarked in the history of business as per 7th of
July in the year 1995 being the most renowned flagship company and important part of Bharti
Enterprises on the whole. Bharti Group has a diverse business portfolio. The Global business
giant has created many products and services in the area of the telecommunication sector.
Some products and services of Airtel are; 3G/4G Technology, Digital TV, Broadband,
Enterprise solution, Mobile Data Service and Android-based Tablets, still much more till
date.
The revolutionary corporate giant has left no stone unturned in making the world
connect with others through Mobile towers and network or Information sharing through Data
webs. Airtel as famous Indian telecommunication Giant operates extensively in 20 countries
across several continents such as South Asia, Channel Islands and extended to Africa even.
(Banik & Nag, 2016). The operation of a GSM Network country wise with 2G or 3G services
as per Country and Operation is the total monopoly of Airtel. As per 2012 data, the Giant
Bharti Airtel has loving customer crowd over 243.336 . This data has been formulated for 20

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 4
countries. It is the 3rd largest telecom operator in the world. In India, Airtel’s name reigns
supreme as a mobile service provider with over 176.95 or more subscribers again as per 2012
data. The first leading competitors for Airtel in telecom sectors are China Mobile and China
Unicorn again as per 2012 data.
Airtel being coined from Bharti Airtel workspace, is a corporate giant and most
importantly the first private company catering to 23 telecom circles. Since its inception from
way back 1995, Airtel has been a forefront player in technology, mobile, research, and
development and has steered the course of International business with its customer service
reigning supreme in world-class level and high end, high performance products. The
business of Airtel is encapsulated in a shell which can be broken down into basic strategic
segments; Mobile World, Airtel Tele media Web and Enterprise Network. Let us ponder over
the Market Share Airtel has as depicted by this picture. The data can change with the
changing time and date and the maturing effect of the business environment (Prasad &
Mishra, 2014).

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 5
Image Source: (bsmedia.business-standard.com)
If seen the market share of GSM operator be it Vodafone Essar, BSNL, Aircel,
MTNL and Loop along with Uninor, Videocon and Idea Cellular,. Airtel has a considerably
higher share and it is more than 28.35% or maybe much more than that in real-time markets.
While choosing the tower for Data or cellular service, the service provider also looks into the
issues of network breakups, slow connection, no internet problems and duplicity in bills
problems. Airtel facilitates to provide all types of services and help to people and in their
advertisement. They have shown reaching all outer regions of the globe, the far off villages
and places where at times electricity is also a big problem, but Airtel along with its tower and
services has always reigned supreme till date very successfully (Mann & Jha, 2015). What
they need to improve in situation analysis is to develop a more strategic alliance with
providers, who provide assistance in improved towers, customer support and services, and
flexible tariffs, shorter to upper grade as per all segments of society so it is plain sailing to

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 6
communicate, work and browse for all. All this would improve the situational analysis of
Airtel much more (Gök & Hacioglu, 2010).
SWOT Analysis
Strengths: With customer record of booming 65 million since the year 2008, Bharti
Airtel is renowned as the most acknowledged cellular providers in India. It has most
improtantly proved itself in the field of Broadband related services and of course, is the King
of Telephone applications world. It has a pivotal role in telecommunication services, be it
domestic and corporate clients and retailers (Ravikumar, 2015).
Weakness: When the business started its initial phase by the great Mr. Sunil Bharti
Mittal, the story entails past incident of few years ago, the business has little or zero
knowledge of cellular technology and their contextual working principle on all domains. So
the start-up business was skilfully handled as an outsource project by the experts in the field.
Until the current scenario, when Airtel did own everything from scratch and their own
network terminology, advertising boomed with business ventures, prior to this, the towers
and business were much in the hands of Hutchison Essar.
Opportunities: With all the partnerships intact, the new iPhone is the outcome via
Airtel distributors across the globe. Another event in which partnership venture is noted in
history with BlackBerry Wireless Solutions. Well, every dark cloud has a silver lining
(Vaněk, Mikoláš & Žváková, 2012). As Airtel outsourced its business to industry experts in
earlier days, this gave it enough time to do research and development and also put questions
on industry formulated approaches and stringent continuous practices, for example, the
decision to replace the Revenue-Per-Customer model with cost effective and more
comprehensible Revenue-Per-Minute model, well accustomed to Indian Environment which
is diversely distributed to small and remote villages, 120,000-160,000/year and town.

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 7
Threats: With Vodafone being a core competitor or having an on/off relationship with
Airtel, is quite a threat in itself. Vodafone owns 5.6% stake, which it sold back to Airtel and
invested in Hutchison Essar, which has been a rival for Airtel since long. So the knowledge,
tower, network, and technology setback from this incident was a big one for Airtel. With an
increase in globalization in telecommunication, an extension of business venture could be in
losses if the world goes into recession scene (Xing & Tu, 2014). This aforesaid incident was
also responsible for not joining hands with South Africa's MTN.
Target Market & Positioning
Whether it is mobile data, blackberry service galore, push technology, web-enabled
automatic referencing email solution with automatic and bewildering push technology saga,
USB based modem for instant connectivity to applications and corporate knowledge, Airtel
data card to exemplify liberal high-speed Internet access anytime and anywhere with
powerful towers all around the world. With offload pressure on billing staff, operating system
independent wireless network, Airtel has reached the acme of success until 2019 (Limited,
2016). Whether to talk about GPRS based solutions of Mobile application enterprise tools,
automatic meter reading elements, track Master or SMS based solutions for private and
corporate centers and call centers specifically, Airtel reigns supreme in all the segments.
Later in Beetel Teletech Ltd, a successful branch of Bharti Enterprise Ltd gave birth to
Android operating system tools based on Google. This was to replace the high demand for
reasonably costed computing related devices with the fastest growing needs of rich
technology research paradigms (Jain, Mittal & Sonwalkar, 2018) of the E-World. Not only
this, the technology solutions can be extended in the enterprise segment giving connectivity
in mobile circles of business segments and fixed-line applications, for example, VSATs,
various configuration ISP and different domain International Bandwidth setups using the
landing stations and gateway nodes. And of course, no one can forget the Direct to the

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 8
famous and inevitable Home TV galore of services abroad India famously known as Airtel
Digital TV started since 9th October 2008 has ruled the entertainment segment till date.
The market liquidity position is dwindling. The absolute Liquid Ratio is unstable over the
important measurable period due to changing of Liabilities which are liquid in nature
constituting the index. Equity ratio thus calculated after all this has been hiking up as a result
of outsider’s investment or funds deposited. The company must balance its income without
increasing the operational costs and daily expenses. The decrease in sales and customer
complaints has resulted in a steep decrease in the profitable position in the company graph
(Mahajan, Misra & Mahajan, 2017). The company needs to control the Profit Marginal Costs.
Marketing Mix Strategy
Let us study the Marketing Mix strategy for Airtel by pondering over some research.
The paper of Indrajith Mallick tells that Airtel can face trading problem due to interbank
activity in their money markets that is the allocation of liquidity not in proper form. This
effect can also be described as “An over the counter effect”. One needs monetary intervention
for bargaining games to win the profitability in the market. This work studied the profitability
performance of renowned Indian public sector banks (Joshi Sethi, 2019). Their guidelines
should be used by Airtel to maintain a proper balance in their banking operations and this can
save them from dwindling graphs. The company should maintain its financial position by
balancing the debt position by increasing its sales by controlling the additions of fixed assets.
Airtel is advised to maintain the important level of profit in operations segment in order to
survive and sustain the dividend pay-out on shares and thus increase their share values and
earnings in International Markets (Hou, 2015).
1. Product- Basically, the Bharti Airtel Business comes in two main strategic groups;
Mobility providing GNM Mobile service in all 23 telecoms Indian circle and Infotel

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 9
providing telephone and Internet services over DSL in 15 circles. This data can vary
according to era, research and the maturation effect of time and year. The company
augments the landscape fo services in mobile, telephone and broadband with national and
international long distance zones as well. Airtel is the brand name in mobile and other sectors
as well, which connects people all across the globe especially in India. The modest journey
entails a business saga which has its decent marginal beginning from Delhi's regional
operator to the mobile giant which is second largest in the entire Asia Pacific region. Their
story makes motivating lessons for new entrepreneurs and business learners.
2. Price- Bharti Airtel uses the competitive strategy of pricing like many other
successful network service providers due to the thrilling competition being present in the
telecom sector. At times, it also adopts flexible pricing strategy depending upon the existing
market situations. In last few years of Airtel Business Graphs, as the operating profit margin
has increased, as a result, the earning and share value along with a dividend pay-out ratio has
increased four folds. A total watch out situation before taking any business leap, partnership,
and ventures. The planning and design of costing have to be done stringently. Expenses need
to curtail. Customer feedbacks, delay in operation and consumer issues need to be addressed
as a priority (Dwivedi & Sharma, 2011).
The hardcore competition and stringent marketing conditions by cellular and other
mobile service providers along with local protocols of the cellular business, Airtel should
follow flexible pricing schemes well suited to all sections of society. Also, it should reach out
to rural and urban areas.
3. Place- The towers play an integral role for the company if it wants to provide total
coverage country or nationwide (Soheli, 2016). With the maturation environment for the
business decided its future, so Airtel made a mistake not pulling off an investment and the
business deal with the South Africa's famous MTN. This company has a Intelligent

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 10
customized E-version of the famous search engine Google which could give a big boost to
Airtel brand and its superb advertising could rank up the business in India for Google engine.
Although Global telecommunications and emerging technology successful telecom brands
see Airtel as a key strategic player in the M-Commerce and E- Indian Business Arena (Kaur
Sahi, Sambyal & Sekhon, 2016).
The stakeholders for Airtel Market comprise of Sony Ericsson, Nokia and the
strategic alliance with SingTel. They are corporate giants who have kneaded knowledge and
technology web all across the globe for telecommunication networks with their coverage of
the whole Indian Nation worldwide. This has underpinned its mushrooming followers,
partners and Customer base (Agarwal & Ramakrishnan, 2010). The twist of events graduated
with Mr. Anil Ambani from Reliance communication joined hands with MTN, with the
African telecommunications market joining hands with Reliance. So, maybe the global
telecommunication giant in the next segment is the aim of Airtel to capture Indian markets
(Pandey & Pattnaik, 2017).
4. People- The outsourcing of mobile services has been allocated to Teletech and
Mphasis, IBM Daksh and Hinduja TMT. The great investment and business alliance for
Airtel is earmarked in the overseas market with their advent of operations in Nigeria and
Seychelles (Dhir, Ongsakul, Ahmed & Rajan, 2019). MTNL and BSNL are Airtel’s core
competitors in spite of lagging behind their technology infrastructure. But these two have
inside reached in rural along with urban areas with profound planning and operations of low
tariffs and easy operation. Airtel is a corporate giant holding telecom market share of about
28% or maybe more till this date. Airtel proves to give better services than others in the
telecom market and hence has proven record of being unique of them all in share market
history (Malik, Aziz & Hassan, 2014).

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 11
The scalable matchbox strategy has earned accolades for Airtel many folds. The Joint
venture decision with the famous Vodafone Essar and the well marketed Idea Cellular to
successfully create Indus Towers, unique and independent in its operations was an earmarked
victory for Airtel. Another feature in the kitty is IPTV as a new service as a long term
strategy (Raza, 2015).
5. Promotion- The Company organizes famous and prominent promotional
campaigns. The promotion strategy which it adopts is the 360 branding. The company has
hired renowned celebrities for endorsing the brand. As it has been seen that Mr. Sachin
Tendulkar, the great renowned cricketer, the famous actor Shahrukh Khan and eminent
musician A.R. Rahman are Airtel’s brand ambassadors (George K. Amoako, 2012).
6. Process- C-dot switches have a traditional background of technological research
paradigm, so it would not fetch high-profit margins. This should be soon replaced by more
profitable, feature enriched third generation switches to improve upon the present situation
with the desired quality and level of customer services. This should further facilitate
simultaneous integration with a nationwide network. No Signal pocket problems can be
avoided if the special distribution of towers is there with a large number (Dvořák & Poutník,
2017). Widespread and conspicuous distribution of channels and services should be given by
Airtel in all rural and urban areas to match the rough market competition. The distribution
network should work on product visibility and availability in all important locations (Ali
Raza, 2012). The research and development team of Airtel should harness untapped large
segment of Indian rural and even urban market to establish mobility in that area and thereby
earn a good market profit share (Anand, 2011).
7. Physical Evidence- Airtel has a good strategic alliance with SingTel since long. Outside
Singapore, it is the highest bidder and investment maker in the whole world. Vodafone is
another strategic alliance maker with Airtel in the Indian Telecom Arena. This is thought

Marketing Plan of Bharti Airtel 12
provokingly one of the largest and most successful segments of single foreign investments in
the field of varying service giving broadband, message and call giving telephone services
and the booming enterprise services as carriers. IBM plays partner to Airtel in Information
Technology deal for its group-connected Information technology needs, along with the
famous Nortel being interconnected for applications call centre IT inputs (Damodaran, 2013).
Recommendations and Conclusion
To conclude this marketing report, one must entail all the resources and pivotal point
of this market study and research. Be it Airtel’s strategic alliance, outsourcing, overseas
market, etc. to attain a complete picture. From the above discussion and analysis, it can be
concluded that Bharti Airtel has maintained its pace in the market be it a strategic alliance,
outsourcing, overseas market, taking care of the competition, maintaining its brand
ambassadors place or holding a place as a leader of the telecom market. Airtel needs to
increase its marginal profitability by all the good measures as stated in Market Mix. Also
while seeing the operational costs, the overheads, daily wages and miscellaneous costs should
also be taken in account.
After the entire analysis, synthesis and knowledge mining of Bharti Airtel, its repute,
lineage, and history with market value, some recommendation matrix is the need of time as
per the study with respect to Market Analysis for Pricing of Products and Services,
Technology Advancement and Research, Diversity in Distributed Channels, Untapped rural
segment and much more. Airtel needs to carefully study and improve upon these
considerations especially formulate a strategy to uncover the Market Risks and Develop a
flexible, user-friendly and progressive portfolio for its Telecom and Mobile Sectors.
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Image Reference:
(2016). Retrieved from http://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/img/article/2016-
06/14/full/1465850210-9571.jpg