In July 2009 when Tata DOCOMO became the 10th entrant in the fiercely competitive Indian GSM Telecom space it had its work cut out. To cut through the clutter Tata DOCOMO positioned itself as the innovator brand with the tag line “Do the New”. A series of innovative products and services followed. First it was Pay per Second, which changed the telecom landscape of India. To keep up the “Do the New” spirit in October 2009 Tata DOCOMO launched Diet SMS. While everyone charged Rs. 1 per SMS Tata DOCOMO charged 1 paisa per character.
Use the Diet SMS product to further establish the innovator positioning of Tata DOCOMO as a honest transparent company that charges for only what you use, in this case only the characters you type.
The strategy was to get people hooked to the cool concept of shorter SMS. What better way than to spread the Dietalk in a viral way through regular social conversation of users online.
The solution was the “Dietalk” Campaign. The campaign sought to glamorize short SMS as the next cool thing with the tag line “Shorter is Smarter” or rather “Shrtr is Smrtr”. A viral contest was started across Twitter, Facebook and Orkut where users were encouraged to Tweet, scrap or do status updates using Dietalk (less than 15 characters).
The beauty of the viral was that users were updating their own status messages or tweeting to their own friends using Dietalk. This created intrigue and curiosity amongst their friends and led more and more people to jump into the viral contest.