John Linton
...... Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast! (Lewis Carroll)
Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on your point of view, I'm not the Red Queen and I have to stay with the, to me, sensible, point of view that no matter how any marketing 'guru' might try to persuade me otherwise (and this one didn't even have blonde hair yet alone a very short skirt and an impressive bust) - I have to be able to believe that a service is salable at a realistic price.
....and....of course......we are talking about HSPA services - yet again.
There must have been, at some time in the far distant past "the good old days" before companies decided they must have 'marketing' people and 'product manager' people instead of sales people to persuade buyers (direct or wholesale) to either buy or resell their products and services.
They must have been the days when manufacturers and service providers established a retail price (from which they might discount in appropriate circumstances) and also established a wholesale price that was based on the retail price less all the costs of selling, supplying and servicing the same product that was then undertaken by the wholesale buyer.
In those days, I assume, the sale of the product or service to an end user returned the same profit to the manufacturer/service provider irrespective of whether it was sold via retail or wholesale processes. So, of course, the manufacturer/service provider had no interest, beyond certain practical 'territorial' issues, in whether end users bought the product or service from their retail processes or their wholesale processes - the bottom line result remained unchanged.
Not today. Not in the Australian telecommunications marketplaces and definitely not in the HSPA 'marketplaces'.
I really wouldn't mind failing to reach some sort of workable arrangement that would allow Exetel to provide an HSPA service to the million or so customers whom I believe would buy such a service if Exetel were able to provide it (no, I don't mean 1,000,000 people would buy HSPA from Exetel - I mean that would be the marketplace size that we would have a realistic chance of obtaining 2 - 3% of over 12 - 15 months; and maybe more).
Each time I think we get close to understanding how that could be achieved some marketing 'genius' or 'product manager (or worse - some 'product specialist') from the supplier gets involved with his/her unbelievably convoluted 'marketing models' under which the service can be provided to Exetel.
OK. Like Human Relations (does anyone actually now remember when a company's 'pay master/mistress became the Human Relations Director?), PR and General Management - "Marketing" and now "Product Champions" have become part of the absurd and horrifically expensive overheads of so many large companies.
So discussing the possibility of actually buying HSPA services from a carrier is impossible without first discussing the wonderful merits of the fizzy mineral water provided in the massive 'presentation room' or whether I'd like my my coffee 'fine ground' or 'medium rough ground' which delivers the true taste of the Kenyan beans so much more 'explosively'. My mild request for Blue Mountain fell on bewildered and quickly huffy ears so in the interests of salvaging some time from this clearly about to be wasted afternoon I settled on the Greek mineral, still not fizzy, water (rather than the Italian, French or local) and a rough ground coffee.
60 minutes later, and by no means anywhere near the end of the 'slide show' and endless demographic analysis, I asked for a break and when I returned I asked two questions:
1) What was the contract commitment in terms of units per month, quarter, year
2) What was the pricing of the proposed 'bundles'.
After a further 15 minutes of just 'completing the essentials' of the base information and then a further 20 minutes of going through the 'various options' that information was provided.
20,000 connections in the first year was tough but, if we are going to be half way serious about offering an HSPA service, not really a problem.
What was a problem was just how we could offer a service, to which we could add very little clear cut value, at pricing that was,at the time of the presentation, 25% more expensive than the carrier was widely advertising the same service.
Hence the Alice In Wonderland quote at the start of this post.
When I raised this, I would have thought, quite simple issue I was amazed to be told that I was just plain stupid for attempting to look at it in that way and that as a wholesale customer I should understand that it was the added value and additional services that would provide the differentiation. Didn't I understand anything about the fundamentals of "positioning" strategy and "early to market sacrifice strategy" and ..........
Umm....errr...."but aren't you only offering a discount off a fixed service bundle (that we can't modify) and that is actually more cost to us than you have just started widely advertising it to end users at less than that?"
Well - how silly was I to raise such a spurious point?
It was actually quite funny so I stayed for another 15 minutes listening to this (non-blonde, non-short skirted, non-amply upper body blessed) marketing 'expert' flounder around in 21st century marketing doublespeak that would have made Big Brother (Orwell's creation; not Channel X's) sound the epitome of clarity and concision - and then I 'fled'.
So, no HSPA for Exetel today - at least from that carrier as I really am unable to believe the impossible, even after breakfast.