John Linton .......it is according some unreasoned adages but they offer nothing to support the view other than the bald assertion.
It occurred to me yesterday that I couldn't remember going back to anything either geographically or in terms of decision making in various other aspects of my life. I wasn't being even vaguely 'philosophical' in this consideration but I was thinking through what to do about residential ADSL in terms of the revised Telstra contract terms and the likely offers of Telstra's new win back efforts and how the various other suppliers will react to whatever now happens. It's obvious, at least to me, that we have to continue to change from everything we have done in the past to overcome our inherent disadvantages of size and marketing/advertising budgets (nil as always in our case).
This was underlined by the Telstra statements that they had 'won back' over 160,000 ADSL customers and acquired over 1 million new mobile customers over the past six months. Now those numbers sound impressive but when you consider the likely 'money give aways' that made that happen the cost per 'win/win back' seems totally out of line with the value of the 'win backs'. I have no details other than the basic announced numbers and I may be quite wrong in my assumptions but it seems obvious that it is costing a lot more money to 'win back' each customer than the likely profit could recover in any realistic time frame.
Obviously, I have never understood anything about 'mass marketing' and therefore I can't begin to understand how to use money wisely (assuming we had any which we don't) on advertising to residential customers. So it occurred to me that we needed to go back to the most successful 'marketing' we ever did - in the very early days when we first 'opened our doors'. This train of thought was brought to mind by a simple idea from the new person who is now increasingly responsible for residential ADSL. She achieved a remarkable result (which cost nothing) by re-defining our employee ADSL2 offer and sending a simple email to our thousand or so corporate customers asking them if they would like to take advantage of the new pricing for their employees. The positive response in the first few hours was overwhelming - at least ten times larger than I would have expected. It's far too soon to quantify what the end result will be but it was a forceful reminder that we used to be much cleverer, and much more successful, using our brains rather than the bludgeons now favoured by competitors with money to spend on advertising.
Hence my train of thought - which included trying to remember why we stopped using those very successful processes which were responsible for building Exetel so quickly over it's first year of existence. Try as I might, I just couldn't remember. But, it seems that we have forgotten just how successful our initial programs were in getting residential customers by never addressing residential customers directly or via 'traditional' marketing/advertising methods. So, is it possible to go back to those 'old' methods? Why not? They worked incredibly well then before, for whatever reason we stopped using them, so is there any reason why they can't be 're-packaged' and used now? My initial thoughts were that we were in a far better position now than we were in seven year's ago - and Mel's simple email certainly demonstrated that.
So....back to the future?.....with several major embellishments that simply weren't either available or possible to/for us seven years ago? I think Mel may have struck gold with her first attempt at implementing a new residential ADSL strategy....and we already have all the mechanisms and processes available.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
ABN 350 979 865 46