This operator with a colorful name claims they are one the 10th best known brands in the world. It might not be quite true (especially if you consider they are not in the US), but we can easily understand it has the potential to compete with the popularity of the Virgins or Cokes of this world. Their brand is at the heart of the company strategy. A few months ago their parent company (a fixed, incumbent operator in a western European country) rebranded all its activities to this new brand name. It’s been a major shakeup in the company, from top to bottom.
Before being acquired by a telco giant, this company started in the UK and has still there a young, fun and trendy image. It was easy (and frequent) to witness the cluelessness of original UK managers and marketeers faced with the parent company decisions taken by people wearing ties and speaking a latin language. Anyway, realism prevailed and the urge to put the acquired brand on top of all decisions is now nailed down into all processes. Let’s take one example : TV. Companies such as the one I’m talking about invested billions in their networks but were merely unable for a decade to derive significant revenues from anything else than voice and SMS. And this new potential killer application coming onto the radar, TV, would come soon on mobiles from a network that they would not own : DVB-H. They faced the issue of becoming a low-margin bit-pipe operator for new services, with an expensive 3G network just good enough to serve the “Long Tail” channels (many channels, few viewers per channel) when the mainstream service (most viewed TV channels) would be delivered by others to whom the fat profits would go. Not being able to circumvent this, and knowing that the only advantage they had is the time that this technology would take to spread across countries (mainly for frequency spectrum issues), they decided to print their name next to the “TV” name in each customer’s brains : if our customers think about TV and video on their mobiles, they should have our brand name in mind. It took several forms :
- branded applications to navigate across channels : your phone becomes an branded remote control.
- Production of specific channels : playlists, digests, daily news…a recently launched service aims at delivering video infotainment customized by the user and downloaded overnight onto the mobile, to be read on the train for instance.
- Programs only available to their customers (video on demand –VOD-) : in Spain they have short programs called mobisodes produced by a beer vendor, only available from the operator’s VOD portal.
- Integration of video and other features already familiar to users on their handsets : program guide, program alerts by SMS/MMS, user’s videos…to link TV viewing with the subsidized handset running their subscription as much as possible.
At the time alternative technologies will be widely available for viewing TV on mobile this company hopes it would have set themselves as The Name for providing such a service, regardless whether they own the network or not. They will get the fat profits.
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