John Linton .....though that's a really tough call as almost everything in broadband advertising and promotion is far from the truth.
Even the stupidest person on the planet would have to understand that the word "free" and the offer of a product or service from a commercial enterprise are mutually exclusive.......or unless you read the various advertisements and web sites of ten of Australia's larger ISPs and telephone service providers you would have thought that.
I have no idea when the outright lie of "FREE!" became a common occurrence in attempting to promote a product but I would hazard a guess it goes back to "washing powder" products in the mid 20th century (this view is limited by my own age of course - it may well have been long before that when my mother explained to me that the word "free" was used to claim that the buyer could get 25%, or whatever, more washing powder "free" by buying a larger container - at a higher price). That dissembling was subsequently swamped by the over use of the word "free" to promote virtually every product ever produced and then every 'service' in every marketplace in the world.
Over the past two months I have looked at almost 150 advertisements and web site promotions for a variety of communications services and the word free has appeared over 220 times in those 'promotions' which any mathematical genius would be able to determine, after a few attempts on their calculator, to be approximately 1.5 times per product/service' promotion'. I think it can be concluded that the word "free" has now been so debased by larcenous marketing/advertising people that it is completely meaningless in any form of advertising and promotion in the 21st Century.
As we approach the, self imposed, dead line of April 1st to 're-jig' the pricing and inclusions of most of Exetel's product and service offerings I have become increasingly at a loss in terms of how to "present" Exetel's offerings in more appealing ways rather than the 'this is our price for these services' approach which we have taken for the whole of Exetel's existence to date. Our approach to date has been to present our services as clearly as possible with as little use of the top row (upper case) symbols of the keyboard as possible and no flash or colour or cartoons etc.
While I'm not 'hung up' on this aspect of product/service pricing presentation, I have become aware that Exetel is one of the very, very few companies in our various areas of the marketplaces in which we operate that doesn't "promote" it's services in marketingese. This point is continually being made to me via an increasing number of well wishing customers and non-customers who point out that we continue to name our ADSL plans with meaningless numbers and letters rather than taking the trouble to use words such as "Big Kahuna" (whatever that may mean) for a large download plan or "Super Extra Fast" or whatever for plan types or categories. That's very true.
In any event we won't be changing from our prosaic plan numbering methodology (I have too much respect for the intelligence of the average customer to assume using 'jargon' would make any difference) but I have been wondering whether we should be using more 'promotion' rather than relying on the customer's ability to compare price + inclusions for the price to reach a decision. So, being relatively imaginative and relatively literate I played around with creating web presentations along the lines of some of the more extravagantly set out offerings from other companies who indulge in those practices. I concluded that my prosaic nature and a vestigial regard for the truth would make that sort of thing impossible for Exetel while ever I played a part in such decision making.
We do need to more rapidly increase our HSPA take up and it would be good if we could more rapidly grow our mobile business but we are heavily constrained in doing any more than we currently do in terms of lower pricing or "free" inclusions as we already, in line with our basic reason for being in business, offer those services at only a marginal profit. We would have liked to add a 'free' HSPA service with some of our higher priced ADSL plans but the issue is the cost of the Huawei HSPA modem which is really expensive and we have still failed to find the 'magic' box that we were hoping would make that possible by now. Similarly our inability to provide 'free' mobile handsets has always limited our mobile sales and offering really low 'real' mobile call rates only appeals to the intelligent buyer/user of mobile services.
So the issue now remains what we do and how we 'present' our services in terms of making changes to what we currently offer. Fortunately there are still a few days to make that happen because right now I don't have a clue. While I really dislike any sort of "me too" approach to the market it seems that our only way of reducing the prices we sell services at is to increase the 'bundling' options we offer. This sort of approach has never 'sat well' with me as I've always regarded it as needlessly complicated and price increase by stealth - or whatever the more correct description is. (in the same way I personally regard mobile "caps"). However I think it's probably long past the time that my personal prejudices have to be put aside and more thought put in to how that could be accomplished.
So, any ideas you may have along these lines would be appreciated as I have none at the moment.