Although mobile communications (mocoms) began primarily as a service for business users and rich individuals, for over a decade mocoms have attracted a mass consumer audience.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps for this reason, it is often the case that mocoms marketing folk have cut their baby teeth in the fmcg sector — those consumer goods\u00a0that move off the shelves so fast that only a short, unpronounceable acronym with all the vowels deleted to save time would keep up with them.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But there are many differences between telecommunications and other consumer products and services, and, despite having pre-cut teeth, these imports don’t always cut the mustard.
\nWe have long tried to identify\u00a0these differences, and the key\u00a0difference seems to\u00a0be the time at which the product\u00a0is created.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 If you sell chocolate bars, you make them in a factory, deliver them to\u00a0a store, and sell them to consumer.\u00a0 The product is created before it leaves the factory door.\u00a0\u00a0 If you sell draught beer,\u00a0the product is partly created before it leaves the factory (that would be the “beer” part of “draught beer”), but also partly created at the time\u00a0the service is purchased (the “draught” part).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0So a publican who waters down the beer he or she sells will alter the quality experienced by the end-user.
\nBut telecoms services are not created beforehand, and they are not even created at the time of purchase; instead, they are\u00a0created at the time of use.\u00a0 Provision of a network and its level of quality are created and re-created each and every customer call, and not even just once per call, but repeatedly throughout a call.\u00a0 As a cellular phone user moves around during a call, for instance,\u00a0his or her call will be routed through different cells, and these may vary widely in quality of service — for example, due to the presence or absence of other, simultaneous users in each cell.\u00a0\u00a0 This is quality of service generated on-the-fly, at runtime, to use some computer-speak.\u00a0 And, as with all marketing, perceptions matter far more than reality:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0if customers expect a network to be congested they may be\u00a0more accepting of quality of service problems than if they’ve\u00a0been led to think they will\u00a0be\u00a0the only users of it.
\nLots of fmcg folks don’t see the difference with their prior world.\u00a0 Marketing can’t\u00a0simply order the folks in the factory to ensure good quality product, and then sit back, gin and tonics in hand,\u00a0to commission a few TV spots.\u00a0 Instead, Marketing has to ensure that customer expectations are set and re-set realistically to match the quality of service being generated by Engineering as the network operates.\u00a0 For new networks, add, “and as the network rolls out”.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Marketing have to monitor customer expectations and perception of network quality and compare with actual network quality in real-time, and adjust campaign tactics as they do so.\u00a0 Marketing, too, has to be generated, on-the-fly.\u00a0 It’s a lot harder than selling candy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although mobile communications (mocoms) began primarily as a service for business users and rich individuals, for over a decade mocoms have attracted a mass consumer audience.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps for this reason, it is often the case that mocoms marketing folk have cut their baby teeth in the fmcg sector — those consumer goods\u00a0that move off the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,47,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corporate-culture","category-market-planning","category-telecommunications","p1","y2008","m03","d28","h18"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}