Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (17 page)

During the day the
salesmen in Ravi’s shop were behind the glass displays; three of the men worked for Samsung, the others for LG and Sony Ericsson. (See
Illus. 10
). These men were trained in the art of mobile phone retail. Their skills boosted the drawing power of the shop, as they sought to engage enthusiastic yet cautious consumers. Their nimble fingers easily manoeuvred between the different functions of the handsets; and their professional and polite manner added an air of sophistication and dignity to their interaction with potential buyers. Much of this involved educating people about the various functions and the latest applications of the mobile phones, the advantages of warranties, service centres, and of course, the respective brand-names. After all, they were trained and paid by the biggest multi-national companies in the field—Samsung, LG and Sony.

For many sales promoters in Ravi’s shop, a routine day was twelve hours with a half-hour lunch break. The average monthly base-salary of these promoters was Rs 8,000, but, as they explained, this sum was usually topped up by ‘incentives’ offered by their respective companies, once they achieved their sales target for the month. For example, a Samsung promoter called Ashish noted that he once made Rs 15,000 in a month, having sold over 140 handsets, a figure confirmed by Ravi who kept close watch on all transactions in his shop.

Anil Kumar, one of the most experienced sales promoters in Ravi’s shop, told how he began working in the cell-phone business. Anil was not a local, and like many of his colleagues, he lived in a rented flat and visited his hometown only every few months. Anil was originally from Gorakhpur (a city north of Banaras near the Nepalese border) where he trained as a Motorola salesman in 2007. The monthly starting salary at the time was Rs 3,500 (US $88) plus bonuses—a significant sum for a young student from a provincial town. After he graduated with a BComm degree from Gorakhpur University, he moved to Sony Ericsson where he saw more opportunities. Sony did not employ sales promoters in smaller towns such as Gorakhpur (population about 700,000), so he found a job in Banaras. He had been an employee of Sony Ericsson ever since and had worked at three different shops with Sony display cabinets. His base salary steadily increased to Rs 8,000 by 2011. He listed the benefits he found in working for a company like Sony Ericsson. Sony ensured sales promoters were kept up to date with the most recent handsets released to the market. The company arranged monthly refresher courses, usually in one of the top hotels in Lucknow, the state capital, and where he and his colleagues met with senior sales executives to exchange ideas and learn about new models.

Some sales promoters worked
throughout the year, especially those based in larger outlets and showrooms. Others were employed as casuals, sent by the companies to boost sales during festival seasons, especially during the months leading to Diwali in October-November. This was common practice in smaller shops, where a big brand such as Nokia maintained a cabinet of their products but did not have a regular sales representative. This was the case with Shri Ram Communication—the neighbourhood mobile shop at Assi Ghat in Banaras. Unlike Ravi’s air-conditioned shop, with its clean floors and smart-looking sale promoters, Shri Ram Communication was small (5 x 4 metres) and darkly lit, located near the busy Assi Ghat crossing. The shop walls were covered with handwritten posters promoting the latest pre-paid talk-time deals. Shri Ram largely catered to a local male clientele, and it was rare to see students or women in the shop. The majority of clients were from low-income families from the surrounding rural areas: ‘regulars’, comfortable entering the shop in their daily attire of a
lungi
(lower cloth) and
gamchcha
over their shoulder (a cotton towel for wiping sweat from the face) and speaking to the owner and his two workers in their own Bhojpuri language. The working day also followed local rhythms. Trading hours were flexible and imprecise; opening time hovered between 9 and 10 am, and Samir, the owner, and his two employees, could stay open until 10 pm if trade warranted.

Doron was introduced to
Samir through a long-time friend, Deepak, a boatman. Deepak and his colleagues regularly visited Samir’s shop to buy pre-paid credits on their way to the river or back home. Many of the boatmen, and other men in the neighbourhood, were semi-literate and required help in recharging their phones, something that Samir and his two employees were happy to do. Indeed, the majority of transactions involved selling small pre-paid talk-time units, mostly in the form of electronic-recharge (E-recharge) performed by the employee and where the client received an immediate SMS notification that the mobile had been credited. Some clients came to purchase SIM cards. Samir and his workers helped them to fill out the necessary forms and make photocopies of ID cards and of letters (usually a bill of some sort) verifying a person’s address. Occasionally, someone would come in to buy one of the low to mid-range handsets that Samir kept in stock. The busiest months for selling handsets were those leading up to major festivals, especially Diwali, when people often purchase new products. During peak times Samir kept more than double the usual number of handsets. This was also when Nokia sent its sales force to various outlets to promote its products. While Samir kept various local brands in his shop, the main display case featured Nokia phones. (See
Illus. 11
).

In late September 2009, a garland of fresh flowers adorned the cabinet display every day. A young salesman sat next to the display case and sprang up every time a client ventured towards it. This was Sumit, the Nokia sales promoter sent to work in Sri Ram Communication for the couple of months leading to Diwali. The soft-spoken young man had been working in the store for just over a month when Doron met him. Sumit’s story of how he was recruited and trained for the job, and of the pressures a sales promoter faced, was fairly typical of those of other sales promoters we met.

Sumit Churasia was only 20 in 2009, born and bred in the neighbourhood not far from Samir’s shop. He recalled his first handset purchase, a Nokia 1600, back in 2006. Since then, he said, he had six different mobiles, including Samsung, LG and Reliance. Two of his older sets he sold to friends, and the rest were kept at home for family use. His father was a manual labourer, and like the majority of people in Banaras, their home had never had a landline telephone. Sumit’s enthusiasm for mobile phones drove him to go for an interview as a sales promoter for Nokia, which took place at one of Nokia’s major outlets in Banaras. He and 20 other people, only two of whom were women, were interviewed for about fifteen minutes each. Sumit was asked to give a short sales-pitch describing the features of his own mobile phone. While Sumit felt he had done well in the interview, it took Nokia more than a month to contact him. What followed was an awkward exchange between Sumit and the Nokia representative, as Sumit recalled:

One day I saw a missed
call on my mobile which I did not recognize. I returned the call asking whom I was speaking to, but the person on the other end of the line replied with the same question (
kaun bol raha hei?
). I insisted he disclose his name first because he gave me a missed call. But he refused and we began to argue, and I abused him for refusing to say his name. Eventually he said he was from Nokia, to which I replied, ‘Yes, sir, please tell me’ [in English]. His answer was: you are rejected (
tum reject ho gaye ho
), so I said, ‘Why do you ring to tell me I am rejected a month after the interview?’ He replied: ‘An hour ago I was going to tell you that you were selected, but now you are rejected’. So I tried to explain myself and apologized for my rude behaviour, but he just hung up the phone (
‘unhone phone kaat diya’
). I then tried to call him back and explain myself several times but he rejected all my calls.

Yet Sumit was determined, and devised a strategy to contact the Nokia representative to explain himself. He tried calling back that night:

In the evening I called that [the Nokia person’s phone] phone from a different SIM, but he did not answer. He then called back later, and asked, ‘who is this speaking?’ I replied saying, ‘you called me; who are you speaking’, this time he began abusing me for giving a missed call and refusing to disclose my name. I then revealed my name asking him to recall our conversation in the morning and to try and understand my rude response. So eventually he said okay, I’ll give you another chance, come tomorrow to the hotel Gautam Grand at 9 am to begin training.

There are a number of things to note about Sumit’s account of his missed-call encounter. The first is to emphasise the hunger for work among many young men across UP, who remain unemployed despite their educational qualifications.
⁴⁸
Many are desperate for work, whether they are people like Anil who relocated from Gorakhpur to Banaras after completing studies, or Sumit whose desperation was expressed in his persistence. These men were the worker-bees of global capitalism: both its enthusiastic consumers and its youthful, qualified promoters.

The account also reveals
the somewhat disorganised and unpredictable recruitment process. This contrasted with the impressively organised Nokia training course that Sumit attended the following day. Over eight days Sumit and about thirty others enjoyed the luxurious air-conditioned setting of a hotel conference room where they received breakfast, lunch and tea from 9 am to 6 pm. The training involved learning about Nokia’s main handset models from the cheapest to the most sophisticated and expensive. The latter part of the course focused on customer relations and methods of engaging clients and evaluating their needs:

We were trained about how to behave with customers, what kind of language we should use and to avoid doing what many shopkeepers do, that is, to try and sell the most expensive phone to the consumer. Nokia follows a different method, our motto—‘We don’t sell mobiles—we sell solutions’.

Led by two instructors from Kolkata, the course used a range of teaching methods from power-point presentations to role-playing. The last day featured an exam and ‘a role-play test’. A few days later, Sumit received a call notifying him of the outlet he was assigned to: a shop with a Nokia-registered display cabinet. This was what he called ‘on the job training’, followed by a ‘refresher’ conducted by Nokia a week later where the new sales promoters met their colleagues, team leaders and instructors to discuss their experiences.

Unlike the sales promoters working in the larger shops, Sumit worked only during peak times, primarily for the two months prior to Diwali and a few weeks after. According to Sumit, only those who excelled in the job got a permanent posting at one of the major Nokia outlets. When Doron met Sumit at Samir’s small shop in mid-2009, Sumit had only been several months in the job. He kept a meticulous account in a small notebook of all the transactions in the store involving handset sales, including the models he sold, as well as the sales of competing brands, such as Samsung or Indian brands. (See
Illus. 12
). This information, he explained, was communicated twice a week to his Team Leader to account for his sales and to request new stock. ‘We write in our logbook who bought a Nokia set from us and which model and also those who bought other brands and why, so that we tell this information to our team leader’. Thus, using its network of sales promoters, Nokia gained information about purchases and the changing needs of consumers. Such data could be used to respond appropriately, whether in pricing or features. An example was Nokia’s eventual release of a handset capable of taking two SIM cards, something the company resisted, but developed in response to insistent consumers.

Sumit viewed his role as
vital not only for communicating clients’ demands to the company but as the foundation for the whole sales enterprise. ‘We are the most important in the chain’, he said, ‘because if we [sales promoters] don’t meet our target the Team Leader is also in trouble and Nokia too’. It is not surprising that Nokia and other corporations put considerable resources into training promoters and equipping them with skills to handle phone technology, relations with customers and record-keeping and data management. Sumit did not come from a ‘traditional’ business family whose members may have been keeping books and registers for generations. His father worked as a manual labourer for a local cloth company. Sumit was the first in his family to be introduced to bureaucratic capitalism and the requirement to report to unrelated, often unknown superiors. Though the modern managerial environment was new to him, he adapted to it enthusiastically: ‘We are the most important in the chain!’

Medium-sized mobile shops such as Ravi Varma’s Samsung outlet or the smaller Shri Ram Communication shop at Assi Ghat did not rely solely on formal networks to source their goods. This was especially the case in the business of mobile accessories, such as SIM cards, recharge coupons and accessories, which drew supplies from a wide network. Extended in various directions, the networks that were tapped often depended on the nature of the shop. In their investigation of mobile-phone shops in a Mumbai slum, Rangaswamy and Nair argued that such ‘hybrid networks’ were a typical feature of small mobile-phone enterprises, where shopkeepers

forge relations with procurement channels like grey markets, mediate between mobile phone companies (even multinational corporations) and the consumer, expand business loops while renewing existing ones, and encourage apprenticeships for relevant repairing skills.
⁴⁹

The next chapter examines the repair industry in more detail, with its ‘informal’ networks and practices.

As the enthusiastic
Sumit suggested, the missionaries of the mobile were connected in a chain. At one end were urbane advertising executives struggling to transform international marketing concepts about consumers and communications into messages that India’s huge diversity would respond to. In towns and cities, an experienced marketer observed, ‘there is so much clutter; they are getting about a hundred messages a day’; but ‘in rural India the challenge is just getting to them’.
⁵⁰
Once mobile telephony became rewarding for business in 2003, the big enterprises that sold phones and provided cell-phone services drew on the longstanding connections of India’s Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry. If profit lay in mass sales of phones and services, FMCG networks provided a path: ‘FMCG has been using the retailer as an avenue of communication for a very long time’.
⁵¹
The education of retailers, the widespread arousal of interest and the creation of sales and support networks brought mobile phones within the consciousness and the reach of more Indians than any previous consumer item. At the ‘bottom of the pyramid’, the cell phone industry offered both sellers and users more ways—and sometimes
new
ways—to
earn their living.