Searching for a florist this festive season? Fed up with the cackle of recorded voices on dial-in Yellow Pages numbers? Try this exercise. Type FYPDEL FLORIST and send it to 6161. It's a 30-second wait before you get the address and telephone number of a florist on your mobile.
As Indians wake up to the SMS culture what with serials, programmes and reality TV encouraging responses from audiences, the next big thing is info-based services via the SMS route.
That's what Mandeep Singh would like us to believe. He feels, "People need information and with SMS becoming the next big thing, we thought it was the right time to launch this service." Singh should know.
As vice president, (operations and business development) Singh's Next Gen Publishing - a joint venture between the Forbes Group and HDFC - introduced its SMS info-based service last fortnight.
Next Gen Publishing is capitalising on this interactivity boom and has a sizeable bank of nearly 400,000 business listings. Company officials feel it's a good business model for Next Gen Publishing that also brought out its exhaustive directory and a complete CD listing of various florists, boutiques and caterers, to name just a few, in June 2005.
While it costs Rs 2,000 for shops, individuals, lifestyle stores and other companies to get listed with the SMS info-based service, it can cost nearly Rs 300,000 for companies that want to get listed in the directory.
Coming back to the SMS service, the scheme, as mentioned earlier, operates very simply with individuals typing the name of the concerned company, brand or service and sending it to 6161 after which complete details are provided to consumers. The service costs Rs 2 from a Reliance phone and Rs 3 from any other service such as Airtel and Hutch. But here comes the glitch.
One rarely ever gets more than only one response per message - we typed FYPDEL FLORIST and received one contact detail from Karol Bagh, New Delhi - and most of the customers might not find it cost-effective.
Singh however claims, "The response to the service has been overwhelming." Confident of succeeding in this format, a budget of Rs 3 crore (Rs 30 million) has already been earmarked as ad-spends to promote its services through print and radio campaigns for the current financial year. The service, currently launched in Delhi, NCR and Ahmedabad, will move to Mumbai by December.
Despite being a new entrant into the business of providing Yellow Pages solutions for customers, isn't Singh perturbed about the stiff competition he might have to face with its competitors? Singh responds, "The organised yellow pages market in India is Rs 130 crore (Rs 1.3 billion) and in New Delhi alone the market size is anywhere between Rs 18-20 crore (Rs 180-200 million)." In Mumbai, he says, the market size is Rs 20-22 crore (Rs 200-220 million) and having done substantial groundwork, he feels his company can only succeed in the market.
Confident of growing in size, both in the northern India region and Mumbai, Next Gen Publishing is going full throttle and will soon provide its services on the Net.
"We are in the business of generating content and our focus would be on yellow pages and special interest magazines," says Singh, pointing out that the company already has vast experience in bringing out special interest publications like Smart Photography, Car India and Bike India.
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