Tuesday 22 September 2009

Thoughts from Informa's Mobile Pricing, Retention and Loyalty Conference

I'm co-chairing a breakfast briefing at the Informa Mobile Pricing, Retention and Loyalty Conference in Oxford tomorrow, so I came up for the second day today. A few interesting issues cropped up:
  • Dynamic tariffing - The idea of charging according to network loading is a logical one, particularly in price sensitive markets. It allows for a great segmentation of subscribers into those who are willing to pay (e.g. business users) who will make the call regardless of price, and those who aren't, who will wait for cheap prices when the network is less heavily loaded. This is also applicable to mobile broadband, allowing that differentiation of business and consumer users which is critical.
  • Bundling of fixed and mobile broadband is vital even in low DSL penetration markets. We heard from an operator in Turkey, where DSL penetration is relatively low and even there the focus of MBB is on bundling it with DSL and public WiFi, provided by partner networks.
  • If you're going ot indulge in a price war, do it via a secondary brand. This allows some differentiation, even if it's artificial and the service is broadly the same.
  • Attract the customers you want to retain. Most people have low utilisation. Those P2P file sharers who generate all the traffic have very high utilisation and compromise the potential profitability of mobile broadband. Therefore MNOs should avoid acquiring these customers. Try to get the peer-to-peer file sharer to go elsewhere. So don't be the cheapest.

Interesting stuff.

1 comment:

  1. Dynamic tariffing would most likely be the kiss of death for a mobile operator. Don't get me wrong - management, capacity planning and billing would litterally love the new tariff to death, but dynamic tariffing would be such a crystal clear way of signalling how crap the operator's network is. It's like standing on the roof shouting: "This is how crap our network is and you are going to pay more for it because we will prove to you how crap it is!"

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