TRAI - a facial for brands.

1st February 2009 onwards, TRAI has implemented a new policy for Mobile Marketers, Bulk SMS Aggregators and Operators to limit their previous 11 Character Sender IDs (For GSM Mobiles) to only 8 Characters now. The 1st 3 characters are supposed to be the Operator Code, the Circle Code, a hyphen and then followed by an Alphanumeric Sender ID up to 8 Characters. The already limited space for certain 'extra large' brands is even shorter now and has reduced the impact of Marketing Messages by upto 25% ina the consumer's SMS inbox. Although, abbreviations are well known in the 'SMS Industry' but most brands and companies find it difficult to digest.
TRAI's logic of implementing the policy is to basically keep a check and curb the menace of Unsolicited Commercial Communication. As in times before, if a consumer receives a Unsolicited SMS, he/she sees 'ABC' in the From Sender Identity. But now, they would see 'XY-ABC' in the Sender Id. If a consumer wishes to complain of receiving an Unsolicited SMS, they can simply call the Customer Support Helpline and narrate the Sender ID of the Sender - The operator then makes note of which Operator from which Circle is sending such SMS(es). The operator further scrutinises or rather penalises the Brand or Company which has registered the Sender ID.
I personally think, it is a brilliant way to curb UCC but at what cost? The consumer is now more or less immune to the marketing method with increasing Spam SMS's and even more & more brands adopting the cheap means of communication. I believe marketers need to be educated and given the moral responsibility of using such a strong communication tool with discretion so that it doesn't lose its very essence.

Mobile Marketing in India takes a U-turn

Remember the likes of sms based advertising models where you register free to receive SMS's from 'advertisers' and earn money, etc; namely, m gingur, adcadmobi, etc... There seems to be another player in the market who is trying to make this loss-stricken idea into a beneficial one. The company '160by2' claims to give you the ability to register for free, earn money for receiving SMS's from their advertisers but the new marketing strategy that they have adopted is that users (like you and me) can use 80 characters to Send Free Messages to all mobile numbers India and the next 80 characters will contain an advert from one of the advertisers of 160by2 company.
Unfortunately, what the promoters have seemed to ignore is the reason why earlier business models like these failed - Ding Dong! MGingur and the likes, did mass marketing and advertising with a lot of ( I repeat a lot of ) word of mouth marketing which ended up approx 5 lac users being registered. The limitation of this model is that most advertisers (in India and the world) seek information of people or to target people who have reasonable disposable income and are willing to spend it. But the data collected in these campaigns or the people targetted by SMS marketing are of the nature who want to make money by collecting a few paise (smallest unit of the INR) would not be the kinds of to either have reasonable disposable income nor be willing to spend much. Nevertheless, this segment of people are quite good for targetting goods like Coke, Chocolates or items of not much monetary value. On the contrary, not many (or maybe not at all) of these type of companies would be interested in promoting their products by Direct marketing methods like SMS Marketing. Wake up and smell the coffee guys.