Will ‘Jio Star’ be the war cry of IPL fans?

Kolkata: IPL 2023 was slated to be the defining turning point for digital viewing in the battle against TV watching. Instead, it has become a bouquet of ironies, each surpassing the other with gleeful zeal.

A Full Page newspaper campaign with passionate exhortations by the Antilla A-List is indeed the first of the pack. As we know now, with every possible evidence, digital adoption still needs the support of the so-called comatose media, old-fashioned newspapers murdering hapless trees. The task, in marketing terms, is actually behaviour change and the patronage of current business will remain the potent recruitment territory, for some time to come.

But then, the ironies are just beginning. Like old-fashioned ‘promise’ advertising, the mammoth claims have proven to be unsubstantiated. Due to technical glitches, the experience is more local-train than Vande Bharat, with frequent stoppages that are scarily unscheduled. For everybody’s sake, I wish that the matter is swiftly resolved as seamless mobile phone viewing is a societal necessity.

One of the core customer acquisition strategies was free access, a well-honed conduit for easy trials. This will possibly ease some of the angst of the early disruptions but is certainly causing joyless days to competition, struggling to gain necessary customer revenue. It can be occasionally argued that Jio's thinking is damaging the ecosystem of an entire industry, while others are blessed with less bulbous pockets.

In spite of attempting several same-side goals, especially the cable blackouts, TV is steadfastly holding on to its customary terrain, the first port of call for optimal reliability. It still needs static routing and is a nuisance for the gig economy warriors but unless thwarted by the rare power cuts, telecast consistency is guaranteed. Immediacy is indeed the key for sports telecasts and buffering is a self-inflicted disaster.

So, from experiences over the decades, here are some sundry thoughts for the Jio management, on a dangerous expressway to deliver quicker and bigger. Customer trust is more endangered than ever before, especially in the post covid era, and the plethora of choices makes us blink in a jiffy. Already the FIFA World Cup had its share of much-publicised hiccups and anecdotal evidence does confirm a flurry of comebacks - digital immigrants urgently seeking cable repatriation. So, please get the technology act right and invest the real money behind that and truthfully, once that is sorted, word of mouth will do for free what full-page ads do for plenty.

They would also be well advised to read the essence of Professor Kevin Lane Keller’s works, especially the part about the Point of Parity and Point of Difference. Wherein he says that even a significant edge in differentiation is rendered quite useless unless the experience is at par on points of parity. To use an airline example, five-star gourmet cuisine and inflight massages, however attractive, will be rendered irrelevant unless the carrier has industry-standard operational performance. To revert to the IPL case, regional language commentary, however compelling, will be useless if the match cannot be watched without interruptions.

One other matter to consider, for mutual accountability, is to make the service pay to watch and not free to view. Unless of course, the current thinking is a clever way to compensate for acknowledged technical deficiencies and thus reduce discontent. In a larger sense, consumers are quite delighted to pay and this actually increases the stickiness for the service and even sports channel bouquets are never free on cable networks. This will also ensure that the provider is on the ball in every matter connected to customer delight.

But the most important aspect for Jio Management is to avoid the dangerous precedence of promise and truncated delivery and for this, a cultural shift has to happen. For the most part, Reliance consumer businesses have controllable outcomes, retail being the obvious example where it is a practised process to deliver a promise whether the latest iPhone or a giant grocery combo pack. In pioneering-technology-driven businesses, however, the Godzilla promise-based approaches can be easily counterproductive if the experience infrastructure is not fully equipped. Thanks to monopoly digital rights there is no direct competition but folks are already comparing Jio to Hotstar, less hyped but apparently way more effective.

To continue on the irony trail, the performance of Mumbai Indians, another Reliance offspring, was perhaps as disappointing as the streaming, with delivery not matching promise. On a more serious note, many viewers are quietly muttering ‘ Jio Star’ for rescuing the entertainment and this must be urgently rectified.