The Bharti group has snapped up leading music director and composer A R Rahman to build ‘Bharti’ as a mother brand.

Rajan Bharti Mittal, joint managing director of Bharti Enterprises, said, “We intend to rope in Rahman for corporate branding as well as to build Bharti as a mother brand at an opportune time.”

The group is planning to cash in on Rahman’s image which cuts across barriers of caste, creed, age and also straddles international boundaries.

The music director, who shot to national fame eight years ago with his composition for the Tamil film ‘Roja’ reinforced his image further by scoring the music for Vande Mataram.

Bharti has already roped in Rahman to compose five exclusive symphonies- two of the tunes will be based on film music, another two tunes to attract the youth and a lullaby.

These symphonies can be downloadable and can be used as ring tones by AirTel customers across the country.

This is for the first time that Rahman has associated himself with any brand anywhere in the world and features in the new advertising campaign for AirTel.

Besides Rahman, AirTel has two brand ambassadors, Bollywood stars Shahrukh Khan and Kareena Kapoor.

Hemant Sachdev, director — marketing and corporate communications, Bharti said, “the ring tones will be exclusively available within a month to AirTel customers. We are planning to design a fool-proof technology whereby the ring tones will continue to be exclusive to AirTel”.

Bharti has earmarked over Rs 100 crore for marketing and advertising AirTel brand during this fiscal, Mittal pointed out. However the ad-spent does not include promotion of Bharti as the mother brand.

Answering a query on the average revenue per user (ARPU), Mittal claimed that the average ARPU stood at $16.

He pointed out that the talk time in Mumbai has gone up and in the case of post-paid users, it stood at 300-400 minutes per subscriber per month.

On an average the subscriber base was growing at 80 per cent. It now stands at 8 million subscribers which is expected to reach 10 million by December 2002.

Meanwhile, Bharti is gearing up to launch its NLD/ILD services from fixed lines by mid-September.

It has already signed interconnect agreement with BSNL and expects to ink the same with MTNL