Cascading Behavior: How Jio brought 4G Cellular Data into Rural India
Cascading Behavior refers to the manner in which people tend to influence each other’s decisions when they are connected in a social network. Cascading behavior contributes to the diffusion”of a new technology or product within a network. As a new product or technology spreads from the few early adopters to others in the network, a cascade is created whereby people begin to adopt it by virtue of their network neighbors using it. Thus, cascading behavior is the foundation behind the viral marketing strategies employed by businesses. Viral marketing exploits cascading behavior by giving people the impression that everyone in their social sphere is adopting a new product, thus encouraging them to adopt it themselves.
Cascading behavior in the real world can be analyzed via two mathematical models:
- Threshold models: In this model a person adopts the technology if the weighted sum of its neighbours who have already adopted this behaviour is greater than the threshold.
- Independent cascade model:s In this model there is a probability that a person will decide to adopt a technology every time one of their neighbours decided to adopt the technology.
Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (Jio) is the largest telecommunications company in India. They offer LTE network and cellular services. In 2016, Jio revolutionized India’s digital markets by bringing cheap 4G data to the rural markets of India. Since its launch in 2016, Jio’s 4G subscriber base has grown to a whopping 398 million with a majority of its subscribers being located in rural areas. One could say that the cascading behaviour caused by Jio’s viral marketing is responsible for its success in India’s rural markets.
Jio’s initial marketing strategy was of pricing their services at a much lower price than their competitors in order to appeal to India’s rural markets. These low prices in combination with large-scale advertising campaigns pushed Jio off the ground in rural India. This rural market had previously been dormant because they had been sceptical of adopting cellular internet. Jio’s launch-off campaigns consisted of the biggest celebrities in India endorsing it in its widescale television advertisements. These celebrities have a massive fan-following in rural India and were instrumental in nudging Jio’s rural early adopters towards using the service.
Jio’s early adopters were primarily young adults who were enamoured by their celebrity stars and were eager to adopt technologies they endorsed. However once early adopters started using 4G cellular data for social media in rural areas, a cascading effect took over whereby the close-knit younger population in villages and small towns started getting influenced into buying Jio’s cellular data.
The cascading behaviour of young people in rural India can be analysed through the threshold model. India’s population is such that young people in small towns or villages can be considered as a close-knit cluster of nodes. When a node (or young person) observed that their friends were utilising social media and digital platforms more frequently because they had Jio’s 4G data subscription, they tended to also adopt Jio themselves because their peers in local schools and colleges had the cellular service and access to broadband wifi was limited. Thus, Jio capitalised on India’s young rural population wanting to access digital platforms.
Jio’s success with the middle-aged rural population can be analysed through the lens of the independent cascade model. Since joint families tend to be the norm in India, it was observed that younger individuals were helping their older relatives with the process of signing up for Jio. Thus, the probability of older individuals in rural areas adopting Jio could be closely linked to the probability to their younger neighbour nodes being familiar with Jio’s sign up policies and processes, since they signed up for the cellular data services themselves.
In this manner, the spread of Jio’s 4G services in rural India can be attributed to its successful viral marketing campaigns which effectively roped in rural India’s young population as Jio’s early adopters. Jio’s rapid spread throughout India’s rural population was due to cascading behaviour taking over and causing a diffusion of Jio’s technologies within the rural social networks of India.
Sources:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pub/diffusion-paper.pdf
https://iide.co/case-studies/reliance-jio-marketing-strategy/