Reliance Jio is in “Technology Commodity Market”
Reliance Jio is in the “Technology Commodity Market”. Design ripoff by JioMeet & JioChat affirms this underlying message in the market. Technology as a commodity is different from Software as a commodity. White-label apps, frameworks & platforms were in the market for a long time and are an example of Software as a commodity. Commodity trading is one of the oldest practices. Traditional companies’ environments are well equipped with commodity legalities, such as India's Trade & Legal Ecosystem. Reliance Jio has turned the table in their favor from a bureaucratic, regulatory & legal perspective. It could also be possible that Reliance Jio Leadership’s Intellectual Consensus interprets them as a “Telephone Company”. They may be treating today’s software advancement as a telephone software commodity of the feature phone generation.
Let’s take an end-to-end panoramic view to understand this better. Reliance Jio is about Corporate Branding. A lot of technology companies' identity is limited to Product Branding. Uber, Airbnb, Zomato branding is in-n-around their product. Product Branding lacks the ‘Above the Line’ Alter Ego of Corporate Branding. The Alter Ego is a great instrument for fan following & customer loyalty. Jio has not developed it's alter ego corporate branding yet. Maybe we will see that in the coming times. Alter Ego is the reason, back in 2012 Tata partnered with Starbucks in India and didn’t blatantly copy it. Every Lifestyle brand’s inception to another demographic follows the same course. Brands know that ripoff could backfire & damage the identity of a Corporation. Over a period of time, if the company consistently outperforms, the alter ego turns to a cult, like in the case of Apple. Apple is also a Lifestyle Brand. Such branding provides longevity to a company in a competitive market.
Zoom (JioMeet copied) & Whatsapp (JioChat copied) are not Lifestyle brands. They are utilities. In Reliance Jio's case until now, their value is in their cost advantage over other competitors.
Jio is yet to soft-lock the Technology ecosystems like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Locking the Ecosystem in the case of Technology companies is a balancing act of staying ahead in the technology curve and simplicity of enabling everyone to generate data on the company’s own & partnered channels (video, audio, text, history, login, metadata, etc). Commodity Ecosystems use traditional socio-political & geo-political strategies.
Reliance Jio looks like a chocolate basket with missing product-line experience & Identity. Jio product basket is like Sarojini Nagar Market in Delhi, which sells aspirations to middle-class buyers. They would purchase the first copy of Manish Malhotra (a popular luxury fashion & apparel brand) and seldom care about the whole Collection aka Product-line. Could it also mean, a Fashion Design Leader leading their UX?
There is a popular term called Mental Model in User Experience & Design. If the design is based on the day-to-day familiar environment known to the User, then the user could use it with very little effort. In other words, Design matches the mental model of the user. Blatantly ripping off the design of popular products does copy the mental model too that assures that a large set of users already using the popular product can also use the copied product. Although, when the seamless integration and transition between one product and another product will come into the picture, this strategy will fail. Product Line Experience takes a system approach, where all the products in the product line look and feel the same, which turns out to be fruitful for seamless integration and transition. They also reduce onboarding load and learnability curve in case of complex dependable products like Adobe Family of Products, Microsoft Family of B2B and B2C Applications, etc.
The question is, If Jio decides to invest in Design and Research to create a consistent Product-line Experience, How would it benefit them? Would it require them to seamlessly integrate a platter of products anytime in the future? Do they have such a Vision for the Company?
The inverted pyramid iterative exercise to calibrate a consistent product line at such a massive scale will be splendid to watch.
“The Design is the Product in case of apps, for a Layman User”.
As long the Latency & Loading time is satisfactory the layman seldom cares about the things happening in the background to run the app. The innovation is saturating Cloud Computing, SaaS & Internet Infrastructure, as the quality expectations are adequately met. It would be interesting to see a lot of socio-political strategies with traditional companies involved in the upcoming times.
Airtel & VodafoneIdea are already gearing up for the battle by partnering with Tech companies. Machine Learning & Data Science will continue to grow under the shade of Technology Companies.
Part 2
Any popular fashion designer has invested a lot of time and money in branding activities for highlighting the attitude of the fashion line. Selling to elite customers requires the brand to cultivate a niche attitude over a period of time. On the other hand, the middle-income segment purchases the true copy for the reason that elites (high society) are purchasing the same. The middle-income segment pushes the conversation back to cost advantage. This is the difference between luxury fashion & class culture. Leisure & Luxury branding is associated with the affluence of a person to afford to pass the time at their disposal of their Will. Class Branding is imitated to qualify with High Society’s Standards.
Jio is selling it to everyone as a telephone network company. Everyone’s attitude is not one’s attitude. So maybe blatantly ripping off the product design is indifferent to Jio and could be a part of their business strategy.
One of the examples would be the customer expectation from mid-range and low-range mobile phones is to demand all the features at once that highly-priced phones have, compromising with busy and slow user interface screens.
It will be interesting to observe the different Subscription plans Jio will create in the future. The way customers will “perceive” the brand and willingly justify the value of purchase. I am not aware of a brand is perceived by customers as Luxury, Lifestyle, and Necessity by virtue of its subscription plans. Another thing to notice will be overstating the geo-political and socio-political strategies of a traditional company to establish a monopoly eradicating all kinds of demographic competition.
Marketing is the way a company wants it to be seen and Branding is the way customers see it.
It is important to discuss some fundamentals at this point.
Is Jio a telephone network company? The maximum gain is by reaching out to every individual. Is it an Ecommerce and retail company of processed goods? The profit is in a well-defined customer segment. Is it a commodity Ecommerce & retail company? Again the maximum gain is by reaching out to every individual.
Maybe post Universal Monopoly, Jio's way forward is in “Privilege Marketing” through different types of Subscriptions Plans. Partnering with a company like Payback could be on the horizon. Moving from a cash to a point system at such a large scale can be translated as a smooth transition of masses into Jio's own cryptocurrency network.
