Telecoms companies across the board need to at least double the resources they fling at marketing, according to Mike Cransfield, who heads up the telecoms research department Ovum. Although Cransfield admitted that mobile operators are ahead of their fixed counterparts in this area, he said that they suffer from many common ills – chief among these are an inability to sufficiently segment and understand their customer base, and that they are too focused on product-centric marketing.
Cransfield said that marketing tended to be focused on product managers and directors, who would have control of a particular budget, meaning that the marketing of each area would remain within that product management team.
Apart from a tendency for this approach to focus too much on the technology, as product managers are often technology focused, this also meant that telcos are not paying sufficient attention to their overall brand. In terms of their marketing mix, operators are too focused on advertising and promotional offers, he said, instead of other marketing disciplines,
Cransfield said that telcos are missing a trick by not using the platforms and access they have to communicate with their customers, through automatic updates and so on, but also that they miss out by concentrating on technology and service descriptions, rather than talking in terms of user benefits.
But don't mobile operators know all this? Indeed, rather than compete with the likes of Google, MSN and Yahoo!, aren't the likes of 3 and Vodafone instead piggybacking on the success of these online services, hoping to attract internet users of these services by offering mobile iterations?
Cransfiled agreed but added that there are also dangers in allowing these other brands too much living space in the mobile word.
Carrie Pawsey, senior wireless analyst at Ovum, told Mobile Europe that although mobile operators were better at the marketing piece than their fixed counterparts, there is still plenty of room for improvement.
Pawsey pointed out that there is a deal of investment in data mining and customer relationship tools, to allow operators to understand their customers better.
"Even though they may say they have a deep customer understanding," she said, "often they don't know much more than your name, address and credit card details."
Pawsey said that O2 was a good example of a company that had decided to invest in this area, making churn reduction a priority, and buying tools to mine and discover useful customer data.. She singled out Orange as an operator that has muddied its brand in recent times, losing much of the aspirational, focused image it had built up prior to its FT takeover.
So what might this emphasis mean in terms of the mobile industry and its suppliers. Certainly, Cransfield is not calling for a huge splash on advertising, rather he would like to see development of deeper customer understanding, of much greater segmentation of the customer base.
It would also make sense to tie that in with investment in tools that enable a marketing team to make offers and deals to customers on the fly, to develop products based on consumer need and demand in hours, and minutes, with appropriate reporting and management interfaces available back at the marketing level.
There are companies out there that offer just this sort of thing, of course. From the services assurance and management companies, to the CRM and database mining companies, looking at product and consumer life cycles.
But it seems that the first thing that has to change, at least according to Ovum, is a much greater respect for and investment in the multitude of disciplines that marketing can offer.