John Linton
...is impossible for a company that Exetel, at the wildest stretch of remote possibility, could become in 18 months time....and that should have been obvious without wasting so many hours trying to find ways and means whereby it could be remotely possible.
Very frustrating and very annoying and, in some ways, very depressing. However there was an upside - it made me look at what could be done over the next 18 months by focussing on something other than the services we offer today and had planned to offer in the next 6 - 12 months.
From my, obviously limited pespective and knowledge, the thought of working the company to death trying to sell residential WiFi services in a marketplace that will be dominated by four carriers and their sidekicks spending tens of milions of dollars to 'give away' a brand new technology for the next 18 months has no appeal at all. What could a company like Exetel possibly add to that sh** fight? Absolutely nothing - when thought through as the large breasted, short skirted marketing 'experts' (and that's just the males) of the four major carriers dream up ever more extravagant ways of obtaining 'market presence'. After ten years of giving away mobile handsets and mobile minutes it is impossible to imagine what they will dream up to give away over the next 12 months to beat each other for 5 or 6 percentage points of market share for the new technology.
I toyed with some figures on what, collectively, those companies were likey to lose in cash terms promoting their services versus their competitors services over the next 18 months and came up with something between $A100 and $A200 million - but I acknowledge I have no real idea. What I did do was construct the more obvious 'service offerings' that were likely to be put in place in each of the next six quarters by each of the four mobie carriers and use my best guesses as to what might be offered to a 'co-operative' wholesale 'partner' to see if there was any way of Exetel making a WiFi/3G service available.
It's difficult enough trying to work out a marketing plan when you have some firm buy price figures and some empirical knowedge of the pricing and features being offered in the marketplaces currently. It's a lot more difficult when you have to make assumptions in place of knowing the facts. Nevertheless, using common sense (assuming that commodity will exist in this scenario) I tracked forward over the next six quarters using the previous two years of mobile marketing methods, tactics (there were no strategies that I could discern) used by the four mobile carriers and 'guessed' at what might be available to an Exetel like company - and I assumed precious little positive.
I used current scenarios in terms of what a company like Exetel could offer and quickly realised that nothing that had been used to sell ADSL services was going to be of any use at all.
1) Lowest cost was not going to be a remote possibility -- the four carriers have already signalled that they are prepared to sell below their cost for a sustained period.
2) Similarly, larger download alowances would not be possible as the networks couldn't sustain any sort of ADSL like data allowances and the pricing, as above, would already be below cost from the carrier's retail operations.
Tough to even get your head round on even the most optimistic of possibly offered Exetel buy prices.
But then.....as always.....if you turn your thinking '180 degrees' ........some glimmers of light appear.
I tried to picture what an end user was going to be confronted with and what might be possible to use against the carriers thinking in those terms. I began to make a list of what an end user might find 'unlikeable' about the four carriers and their likely marketing/promotion scenarios not what I might dislike but what someone who really wanted to buy the service might dislike and not just "it's Telstra and I hate Telstra" type thinking.
I got nowhere for a while but after a time I managed to write down three major turn offs that I could see woud probably exist and I figure if I keep working on it I may well find more possibilities. Anyway it was enough to make a start on a plan that I have some faith in but it will not produce anything like 20,000 new sign ups a month - maybe 5,000 after 12 months but everything is so 'up in the air' it will need some hard pricing and operating scenario facts before I would be prepared to make any sort of statement on what could be possible.
I have the rest of today to finish the basics and have something reasonable to discuss tomorrow so it will be an interesting day.