Talkwalker’s Battle of the Brands: Airtel Vs Vodafone

Airtel and Vodafone. We don’t need a Battle of the Brands post to establish that indeed these two brands have been battling for ages – battling for a larger share of the Indian smartphone market. Both phone connection providers received a huge blow with the launch of Jio a few years ago – which revolutionized the Indian smartphone market. However, now that Jio has removed free calls from the equation, both Vodafone and Airtel are back in the game!

 

Talkwalker, a social media analytics company, based in Luxembourg, takes a closer look at the buzz, using their platform. Talkwalker Analytics analyses the performance of mentions all over the internet and provides key metrics such as engagement, related themes, demographic data, geographic data and influencer data. 

 

1. Mentions:

 

Airtel is leading the way with almost double the number of mentions as Vodafone in the last month. This is mainly because they announced on all of their social channels that they were indeed, going to keep their free calling available for all of their clients. Clever moment marketing at its best! Vodafone did it as well, but Airtel’s posts got higher visibility and engagement.

 

 

2. Demographic data:

 

We saw the mentions – now let’s take a look at who’s creating those mentions. It turns out that most mentions for both network providers are men - ~70% for Airtel and 79.2% for Vodafone. Millennials form 47% of the mentions for Airtel while they are responsible for 55.5% of the mentions for Vodafone. There are a considerable number of Gen Z mentions and older folks as well – probably some of them are loyal customers from the early days.