Sanjay Behl: Taller, sharper and smarter Big TV boss

Vipin Bajaj - Televisionpoint.com | New Delhi | Mumbai
The first thing that you notice when you meet Sanjay Behl, chief executive officer (CEO), Big TV and group head, brand and marketing, Reliance Communications (RCom), is his height. Being sharp, articulate, having a fair epidermis, and at 6 feet plus his personality has nothing remotely dwarfish about it.

Sanjay Behl

Behl, an MBA in marketing from Sydenham College (Mumbai), passed out in 1990 as an engineer from Institute of Technology, Benaras Hindu University (ITBH) to join Ranbaxy as production supervisor for antibiotics on the shop floor, before moving to Mumbai for a management degree.

After completing his MBA, he joined HLL (now HUL) in 1993, as a management trainee in the sales and marketing function. His first four years in HLL were spent selling soaps and detergents in Maharashtra. He then went on to become the brand manager for several categories, beginning with the dish wash category (which later became home care category), with Vim under his rooster.

Behl was later given the mandate of heading the marketing for the laundry portfolio, looking after brands like Surf, Rin, Ala and 501. After 10 years in HLL, Behl joined Nokia as head of marketing. At that time, telecom was on the verge of a boom. He moved from Mumbai to Delhi, and was among the first few team members at Nokia, setting up the office and hiring personnel.

In 2005, Anil Ambani discovered Behl's values and roped in this marketing wizard out of Nokia and made him the branding centre point of his maiden consumer facing business – RCom. "My initial responsibility at the group was to oversee the new corporate identity of the group and the transition to Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG)." he says.

Behl's stature within ADAG soared when RCom surged ahead of its rivals in the mobile telephony segment, within striking distance of market leader Airtel. So when Arun Kumar Kapoor, the then CEO of ADAG's Big TV, the DTH arm of ADAG, jumped ship, Ambani predictably zeroed in on Sanjay Behl to step in as the driving force.

High on his success with RCom, Behl was happy to tap into his experiences with the mobile telephony venture to make the DTH business a viable proposition for Anil Ambani. Just three months into his new role and Behl is really making serious strategic inroads.

"Our experience in enriching the mobile screens of over 80 million customers through popular, interactive and utility value-added-services makes us confident of creating similar excitement, never seen before on millions of TV screens in India," Behl says.

The DTH industry in India is still in a nascent stage with just 13 million subscribers (while there are more than 403 mobile subscribers) and with growth pegged at 18 per cent Q-o-Q, there is immense space for Behl to make a play for potential consumers.

But the difficulty comes from the persistent non-acceptance for DTH by the masses. A key reason for that is that consumers have not really realised the value proposition that DTH seeks to offer and so see no need for change. Big TV's obvious late entry into the segment, where Dish TV and Tata Sky have already taken the lead, is another disadvantage.

However, Behl is confident of changing perceptions about the generic nature of this industry - with pricing being the key differentiation between players till now - by creating Big differentiations for Big TV's offerings. Says Behl, "Value proposition would always be the key differentiation in a customer centric entertainment market."

Behl is banking on Big TV's pay-per-view (PPV) bouquet to deliver. The DTH player has recently spiced up its PPV offerings with live shows, exclusive concerts, while other players have stayed with mere movie content in the segment.

Big TV was the first player in the industry to come up with a monthly subscription plan for movies in their PPV bouquet, enabling customers to view them anytime during that month as opposed to charging separately for each featured movie being offered in that month.

"The response for our PPV services has been very encouraging," agrees Behl, confident about the imminent success of their strategy. After all, as per estimates, India's PPV segment is estimated to grow at 16 per cent annually to log revenues of $ 11.3 billion by 2012.

Behl is hoping for the segment to emerge as a key driver of the DTH business not only in India, but the whole of Asia. His hopes are not misplaced. Independent market research has shown that India will remain a leading PPV market in Asia with superior growth prospects in the near future.

"Over the next few years, Big TV expects PPV to contribute nearly 10 per cent of its revenues," says Behl. No wonder, he is now also planning to introduce sports and events content in its PPV bouquet.

Having already bagged the rights for the concert for Michel Jackson – 'Live In Bucharest: The Dangerous Tour' last month – the company is also in talks with other Indian and international content providers to offer more such content on their platform.

Big TV is also lining up a slew of interactive features and a major revamp of its filmed entertainment content, besides bringing in whole new range of channels, which were not available to Indian TV viewers in India till now. Behl says Big TV will be offering the entire Fox bouquet to its consumers shortly.

The other strategy that Behl is deploying to beat rivals in the segment has been drawn from his experience, while working with HUL's Vim brand almost a decade ago. "Consumer Insight is the key. While with HUL, I visited my rural consumers and even washed utensils in their homes to understand customer psyche," he says.

Behl says he is planning to conduct a similar exercise at Big TV to find out what more services could the viewers want and need. Besides, the focus is also on providing the latest technology to consumers. With this in mind, Big TV had launched DTH services on the MPEG 4 platform, while others like Dish TV and Tata Sky are still sticking with the MPEG 2 platform.

However, some of the enthusiasm at Big TV has not really translated into action. At the time of launch only, Big TV had announced that it would be coming out with a DVR-based set top box that would allow consumers to record and pause live TV. But it's almost a year now and there has been no news from Big TV of the same.

Quiz Behl on DVR and he says, "We will be offering it shortly. We are looking at providing more options to customers to choose from." The plan is also to price the DVR competitively for which Big TV officials are currently exploring all options to offer modified DVR sets at a cheaper price.