Thoughts on target marketing by carriers
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
In Henry Ford´s 1923 autobiography “Henry Ford – My life and work,” he quotes himself as saying “Any customer can have a car painted any color he wants so long as it is black.” Although this type of mass marketing approach is sometimes used today, it is most commonly a reflection of an old and outdated paradigm that focuses on profitable transactions while disregarding customer satisfaction.
With the evolution of an internet-based economy, this old, mass-marketing paradigm has shifted to target marketing where the focus is on customer lifetime value, satisfaction, and retention rate. The transparency of information in this new paradigm can be illustrated by the ease in which product prices in the stores can be compared by simply scanning a product barcode with a smartphone or the fact that product performance evaluations and comparison across competitors can be accessed in real time online through consumer reports websites.
With the internet-based economy in full swing, and the dawn of the 4th generation of the mobile broadband market quickly encroaching upon us, it is not surprising that carriers are quickly adopting the targeted marketing approach for their service portfolio, with the objective to increase their ARPU, reduce customer churn and increase service stickiness. Mobile Broadband market segmentation suggests that consumer needs are fundamentally different than the needs of Enterprise and even MNC (Multi National Corporation) customers.
While consumers care primarily about price, throughput, access to mobile applications, coverage and seamless mobility, enterprises care about a variety of other service attributes, including cost control, insight into overall spending trends, control over corporate access, security and compliance policies, and feature richness, such as seamless Wi-Fi on campus roaming and self service provisioning, to name a few. MNCs, who are usually larger and more globally dispersed enterprises also require higher level of service scalability and more sophisticated policy controls for international roaming.
While a couple of years ago it was still a common practice for carriers to position their consumer-grade service offerings in a mass marketing approach across the board to small to medium businesses (SMBs), small to medium enterprises (SMEs), enterprises and MNCs, today there is a clear recognition in the carrier community that target marketing is required. Therefore the carriers are in the process of developing service offer portfolio strategies which address specific and in many cases unique requirements of the market segments and as part of this strategy develop more enterprise-grade and MNC-grade service offerings.
Today’s announcement that iPass is partnering with Deutsche Telekom’s International MNC Business Unit to deliver a range of new integrated mobility services for multinational corporate customers is an illustration of this targeted marketing approach. While iPass has been partnering with Deutsche Telekom for quite some time, this announcement is focused on two new elements – targeting MNC customers and using the Open Mobile Platform as foundation for this service.
The iPass Open Mobile Platform was launched in 2010, to enable its corporate customers to define the mobility experience for their mobile workers, provide complete visibility into usage and costs and to enforce connection, cost and security policies.
This newly launched service is expected to offer great opportunities for both the Deutsche Telekom’s International MNC Business Unit and their MNC customers. For Deutsche Telekom launching this service is an opportunity to increase customer satisfaction by offering “MNC-grade” services while increasing ARPU and service stickiness by up-selling value added services, and promoting their brand recognition; all this while mitigating their operational cost by leveraging economies of scale with the cloud-based Open Mobile management platform. For Deutsche Telekom’s MNC customers, the Open Mobile Platform-based service benefits include international roaming cost reduction by leveraging iPass’ leading global footprint of hotspots, higher user productivity with seamless network connectivity, better control over corporate policies of the mobile users, and predictable and steady service fees.
See the press release >>
See the German press release >>
