Micromax- one of the largest companies in India selling low priced cheap Chinese phones. This is the irrefutable answer you will receive maybe in a different language or dialect in the Indian sub-continent.
A name synonymous with "smart feature phone" rather than "smart phones."
And rightly so, they allege that they were never cheap, they were affordable and they were compellingly dragged under the thraldom of this inevitable positioning.
But the domestic brethren cannot be blamed for thrusting upon Micromax this thorny, prickly crown. Particularly when the company made inroads into a market dominated by multi-national sharks by offering a bewildering almost obnoxious offering of a Rs 2300 mobile with an advertised 30 day battery backup. At that time, it was regarded an old little pony, an aberration to be ignored. But then it emerged as a dark horse with their unparalleled follow up offerings like a dual sim phone, universal remote control phone, a women centric phone with a Swarovski crystal on it and many more. With such unprecedented product offerings they unseated the Moghuls of the mobile industry like LG, Apple, Nokia, etc and grabbed an indomitable 22% market share only second to Samsung.
But still it wasn't able to rub off the notoriety of being an Indian domestic company selling cheap Chinese phones. And the international revenues accounted for less than 10% revenues today.
Micromax thought an innovating unthinkable strategy to extricate itself from this conundrum. It signed Hugh Jackman for its high end product: the Canvas smartphones.
Now let us look into the rationale behind it:
Sorry Bollywood........
In Bollywood there are many occupying the zenith of superstardom and all of them,some raised to the pedestal of apotheosis, endorse innumerable brands which nobody have a proper count of. Also their beatific faces appears on a lot of spurious brands. They wanted a face that is exclusive to the brand particularly for the Indian consumer. For that, it is ludicrously obvious to look for that face in LA and not in Mumbai.
Me first.....
Signing Hugh Jackman would turn out to be an unprecedented marketing campaign in Indian corporate world where an Indian company would sign a Hollywood stalwart (although there had been sporadic incidents where Indian companies have managed to sign English, Australian cricketers but for particular ads of negligible significance and hackneyed concept but not for a blitzkrieg marketing campaign), this would invariably comply to its tag line "Nothing like Anything".
Made in India....Uuhh....Let me think about it.
Also Indian products are considered superior when it is catapulting from the factories of yoga and Ayurveda, but Made In India mobiles would be unquestionably considered inferior as compared to its Korean, U.S and Japanese counterparts but still superior to its Chinese counterparts. So Mr Micromax was aiming at a paradigm-shift from a lowly Indian company selling cheap phones to a global brand providing quality, state of the art products to reckon with. This requires a face who has a global outreach which they found in Hugh Jackman.
HUGE Jackman......
Now if you have seen the pervasive advertisement of Hugh Jackman, he is inspired by a juggler and he juggles many lives. And isn't a smartphone judged by its ability to multitask? If you take a Jackie Chan or Vin Diesel, these actors are familiar faces when it comes to pure, unadulterated action which gives
the viewer an adrenaline rush. If you take Hugh Grant, the butterflies of romance flutters around you. Hugh Jackman is considered to be a versatile actor, a virtuoso who has donned every role with impeccable finesse. He can sing, dance, fight, in short can act, display or emote every conceivable emotion the soul and the mind of a human being can produce. Also the recent unfathomable successes of the X-Men series and his other films has made him a known face in India. Even the youths in Faridabad, Ghaziabad would be aware about Hugh Jackman though obscurely. And this goes without saying that Hugh Jackman has a monstrous fan following all over the world. So it is hitting two birds with one stone, a brand whose ambassador is an Hollywood veteran superstar is immediately prejudiced by the import-obsessive Indian consumer to be a valued brand and also at the same time it adds a global icing to the brand.
In short, the primary aim is to mutate from a cheap-fuddy to a global phenomena with the ancillary aim of upping the ante in the Indian market
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