Changing Indian Market Place - From Category Penetration to Competing for Market Share

We are entering the second phase of marketing in India, for the first time we are witnessing a situation of categories entering into a stage where penetration would reach near 100% or exceed it. Till now we have been working on marketing strategies to increase penetration , getting the first time users to try out offerings versus a situation where the you have to either increase the usage of the product or a service in a well established market. This is where maybe we will see the true meaning of the statement "Customer is the King".

Taking the example of what is happening in the mobile phone market, in most of the metro markets the penetration levels are reaching 80% and in some markets like Chennai the figure has exceeded 100%. So what does it mean for new operators like Aircel, and virgin mobile when it enters a market where the category penetration is so high. There would be two ways of gaining market share , first and more difficult option would be to try and attract users from established players or second way is to encourage users to go for another mobile.

To push consumers to switch their operators would involve a different set of marketing strategies versus the ones which are used to increase the penetration in a particular category. May this is what we can see from the approach that both virgin and aircel are using , by focusing on value added services and non-typical offerings like paying for incoming calls. But this is just the beginning and we will see the manifestation of this change in the coming few years...