"No Other Brand Can Compare Intex Support Service": Nidhi Markanday, Intex

In an interaction with PC Quest Nidhi Markanday, Director & Business Head of Intex highlights the market strategies and the future plans of Intex mobile.

Nidhi Markanday, Director & Business Head, Intex

How many Intex smartphones and feature phones are in market right now?

Intex portfolio currently has about 15 models, and soon there will be three more addition to the family from July to November. We will be launching another six models in smartphone category. Intex is known for the value of products. Today if we compare to any other Chinese brand phones like Oppo & Vivo, our phones are much cheaper than their phones.  So, with the same specifications and features Intex is almost 70 to 80% cheaper.  And we are very much in demand in the market below 8k category.  The company is sticking till 7K phones and not going beyond that as per market scenario.  The reason behind that is that we don’t want to experiment on our price ranges.

What are the trends that have been followed by Intex mobile in terms of physical appearance and software?

If we see the trend the market is going towards the camera phones, which have become the first need of the customers.  Everybody wants a camera phone and a good battery life. So we have our in-house team who works on these apps and we also have various apps developed related to health, beauty and diet.

People love to communicate in their vernacular languages, for these customers we have Matrabhasha which helps you communicating in your own language. Infact, our team has also worked to fix the OS so that it can entirely changes to local language like Punjabi, Guajarati or Marathi whatever region you belong to.

Also we have tied up with few companies which were offering economic data usage.  Even with the Microsoft we have collaborated for the cloud solutions.

What are the initiatives taken by Intex in terms of branding and marketing of products?

We believe in the marketing strategy. From last 3 years we come up very strongly in the Indian market. Intex has various brand ambassadors for different regions. For mobiles only, we have 4 different brand ambassadors for instance; Farhan Akhtar is our national brand ambassador. We also do branding; targeting the individual states that’s why in recent years we have been able to crack the market.  The other initiatives are ATL activities which we doing regularly.

Very recently we have conducted our TV campaigns for the product called Aqua lions 4G with the Gujarat Lions team. Now again Intex will be in action from August to November. We are also planning various campaigns in different cities.

In Feature phones category, the regional languages is our USP. Intex was the first brand to launch a feature phone which has a bigger battery that also acts as a power bank; that was ultra 400. We also have a phone which read the currency to check whether it’s a real one or fake. We are also coming up with the Selfie phone in feature phone segment.

How many R&D, Retail & service outlets are there?

We have a distribution setup of about 1500-2000 dealers who are associated with us.  In almost every town and city we have a presence. In terms of service, Intex have a very good service setup which no other brand can compare. Above 1500 service outlets are there in the market, out of which couple of these are owned by intex. The balance is on the franchisee model which is called Intex care centers. The dealers are mainly associated with the retail outlets in the market. Beside these, we also have presence in all the LFRs whether it’s Croma, Reliance or Metro.

What is the road map of Intex for next 12 Months?

We are planning to take the full advantage of festive shopping season around Diwali in October.  The brand will continue playing on its strengths, as the devices will be priced between Rs 4,000 to Rs 8,000, with the most expensive phone costing Rs 8,999. Intex will opt for both online and offline retail channels for selling its devices, and will also have exclusive products for respective e-commerce websites. Whatever mobile phones we sell out of that 70% to 75% of the phones are featured phones. Today, whatever range we have is all 4G smart phones.

All Intex’s upcoming devices will be 4G VoLTE-ready and run Android Nougat out-of-the-box.  Intex is also promising that its smartphones will be upgradeable to the next build of Google’s OS, i.e. Android O. Instead of focusing on certain features for its entire portfolio, the brand will be launching different series catering to respective users.