Blue Ocean in Mobile Services
In my last post on the business models in the wireless industry, many readers commented that the consumer is the king and the most successful business model would be one that would keep consumer’s interests in mind. I fully endorse this view. There is not even an iota of doubt in my mind that the consumer adoption is the key to success of any service.
Currently, I am reading a book called – The Blue Ocean Strategy. The book is how to create uncontested market space and make competition irrelevant. In one of the chapters, the writers discuss that for any service or product to be successful, it needs to pass the consumer utility test. The book quoted the examples of Philips CD-i (video machine, music system, game player and teaching tool all wrapped into one) and Motorola’s Iridium which failed despite being the technology marvels. The reason for their failure was lack of consumer adoption. Consumers did not find the products simple enough to use. The authors give a simple framework that if applied can help identify the consumer pain points. In this framework, the key consumer attributes like ease of use, fun, image, risk, productivity etc. are plotted against the entire lifecycle of a product or service viz., Discovery, Purchase, Delivery, Use, Portability and Disposal. If we analyze each of the resultant cells, we will be able to remove most of the impediments to consumer adoption. I realized how appropriate this framework is for mobile value added services (I will call mobile VAS as “Mobile Services” in the rest of the article as I believe that many value added services are now as important as voice).
When I applied this framework for mobile services adoption, I realized that there are roadblocks in each and every cell. Let me elaborate the point with “Ease of Use” as one of the parameters and plot it across the service lifestage
Discovery – Try to find any mobile application and you would realize how difficult it is to find what you need. I would rate lack of good discovery mechanism as the biggest impediment to adoption of services. How can I buy something that either I do not know about or do not know how to find it
Purchase – Are there sufficient payment mechanisms available for me to make the payment? Consumers struggle to make payments for services they utilize outside the carrier walled garden as the carriers do not have sufficient revenue sharing agreements with the content and application owners. The carriers want a lion’s share of the revenue which has forced many content owners to directly reach the consumers through the web and credit card payment. This has resulted in a few good services providing end to end solution. Barring Apple’s iPhone/itune, RIM’s mail service and Ring Back Tones, I find it hard to think about end to end services
Delivery – The delivery of the service could be either through SMS, GPRS, USSD or IVR but rarely the experience is the same across all these delivery platforms. On top of this, the mobile internet experience is sub standard and erratic at best
Use – Is there sufficient help available to the consumers? Do they know who to get in touch with in case of difficulty? Are there sufficient physical locations where the consumer can go to get a demonstration? I have come across many applications on which even basic help is not available. Even the services provided by the big carriers and handset vendors assume that the consumers are technology savvy. If the consumer is not on flat fee, then he is afraid to use the services for fear of high bill. Carriers around the world need to do a lot more to make the internet charges more transparent and affordable
Portability – The application that one buys on one handset can rarely be ported on to the new handset when the consumer replaces it. This creates a big dissonance amongst consumers. As the applications would become more popular, the consumer would face the dilemma of either spending again to buy the new licenses of the applications or postpone replacement of the handset. The handset vendors would be badly hurt if the consumers start to postpone replacement
Disposal – So many times, I come across consumers who do not know how to unsubscribe a particular service. There are sometimes different codes for activation and deactivation of service and if the consumer does not remember the short code, it could be a difficult proposition for him to deactivate the service
As evident from the above simple exercise, there are impediments to adoption in each and every step. Simplicity is the key and in our endeavor to beat the competition, we keep making the service more complex by adding features to it. Have the consumers adopted even the basic service without enhanced features? Nobody is ready to answer this question and what is the point in making the service more technologically advanced it the basic features themselves are beyond the understanding of the consumers. This simple framework can help address a lot of woes in the industry. We can similarly map the consumer pain points across other parameters like risk (especially impotant in case of mobile payments), productivity, fun and image and other key attributes. Once we ensure that the above consumer utility/acceptance framework is in shape, we can move to other issue of price. We need to think of the price of service/application in a strategic manner. The cost plus pricing would not work as the consumers would be ready to pay only for what they value. In their mind, the service should either be fantastic that they feel the need to pay for it or it should be free. Looking at cost to price the service would mean that we would kill the service even before it is launched. Hence we should decide the strategic price first and then work backwards to decide what should be cost to get the desired profitability. The service providers would do well to provide differential pricing for different markets depending on purchasing power of the market.
Once the cost of service is arrived at, the service provider should look for ways to reduce the cost to the desired level. They have the option of bundling the service with bandwidth or they can become service MVNOs or they can look at alternate business models. If it fails to get the costing at the strategic level, it would be forced to look at alternate business models and hence even more innovation is likely to set in the industry. To illustrate, in the gaming industry, if the cost of the game could not be brought down to the pricing levels demanded by consumers, then the vendors should look at in-game advertising as alternate revenue stream or pay per use mechanism or even micro transactions (basic game is for a nominal fee and with every level of advancement, the consumer would need to pay additional money).
If the service providers are not able to address the consumer utility framework or are not able to bring the cost down to the desired level, they would be well advised to abandon the initiative and launch it only when they are able to do so. Half baked measures would not help – take a hard decision!!!
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Hi Mohit,
It has been a great learning about the key consumer attributes in consumer business scenario. Thanks for sharing this. To me, it is hard to answer your question – What is the biggest roadblock to adoption of mobile applications?
I would re-order the the attributes (in terms of priority) as…
1. Utility of Applications
2. Ease of use
3. Price of Application
4. Discovery of Applications
If an app is highly usable, easy to use, and at a right price, it will spread virally and makes it discovery proof! Smart marketing can further help in product adoption.
I believe that the most important one in any consumer products is the usability of it in people’s life for them to sample it, and price for adoption. This may be the reason for the extremely high mobile phone user growth compared to PC worldwide.
Hi Mohit,
The challenges you have mentioned against each of the attributes seem to be relevant in the case of India and other countries in the league who have not yet transitioned to a higher generation technology.Do you think data services are still having the same challenges in Japan/Korea
With spectrum challenges, I doubt carriers spending effort to address them anywhere in the near future
Thanks Suchitra for your comments. The purpose of the post was to illustrate the use of the buyer utility framework. Some of the issues like the data services may not be relevant in markets like Japan, Korea and other places. However, the ecosytem players may still apply this framework to figure out the new consumer pain points that may have emerged.
How about this Mohit?
Now that the memory cards are becoming cheaper by the day, cant we have games and applications on the card which can be fed to the mobile directly?
I remember buying lots of Game Cassettes for my Samurai video game when I was in class 5 and I remember exchanging cassettes with friends. I think the same funda is applicable here as well.
The other advantage of a memory card is that, we can restrict the number of times game is played. So that business model can work. The problems of delivery, usage, portability and disposal are taken care of by this model.
Hello Mohit:
Refreshing to see some views that I am looking to understand…I think you are bang on and the problem lies in the attitude of the company…I mean most of the companies are Product Led – create a solution without understanding the need and then sell it…Whatever problems you stated in your article, I think, are direct result of being a product led company…
I believe company these days are understanding this and trying to become market led which would understand the consumer need, pricing points and then ask the product team to create a product which would serve that need…
The biggest problem in the above approach is the people management…Its a big change management exercise…When you are product company, then your biggest assets are your resources who are creating products for you…And in the market led approach, marketing personnel would tell the most important group in the company what to develop and what not to develop which I think wont go down very well…
So its a tough choice which the companies have to maintain very intelligently…And I seriously belive that companies would be able to resolve most of these problems if they become more market focused…
Amit Agarwal
@ Siddharth Shah
Hi Siddharth , talking about memory cards, reliance has come up with memory cards which are loaded with songs. So one can buy them and put in the phones which have memory slots.
This was just fyi.
Tejas
@Tejas
Thanks for the information. Am sure we would soon see games and other applications on memory cards.
I believe they would sell more than songs as people like to mix songs and playlists unlike that of games… This mixing, I assume memory cards cannot support.
Sid
Hi Siddharth and Tejas,
The memory card is certainly a method of providing applications to the mobile users but it may not be the most optimal method. Moreover, the purpose of the post was to introduce the framework that we can apply to the mobile services.
Most of the applications are tied to IMEI and hence cannot be used on more than one handset and hence cannot be exchanged between users
Hi Mohit
Content on Memory card is big today , you can have Videos, Songs,movies etc on the memory card , with DRM protection. when ever a user wants to use the content he sends a message to a short code recives the DRM Key and use the content , he can also send this content to other friends and get the DRM key and use the content
Regards
Rabinder Chopra
Mohit,
Mobile Value Added Services (MVAS) market holds a great potential in India as experts believe that this market in India would reach Rs. 6000 – 8000 crore by 2012. Further, India is likely to witness two major trends, whereby Urban markets will move beyond P2P SMS and voice applications and demand richer MVAS. On the other hand the rural market will have greater focus on voice. Having said that, the experts also believe that the industry will have to face some key challenges. These will be challenges related to the consumer, enterprise and regulatory aspects.
Talking about challenges releated to the consumers, one of the major challenges is content localization as most Indian customers still prefer regional languages while interacting over phone. Bandwidth crunch faced by service providers due to faster front end growth than backend growth makes it difficult for consumers to access richer VAS through their devices. This reduces the utility of such services to the consumer and hence impedes uptake. Most Indian customers prefer to use lower – mid range handsets that do not have capabilities to support full range of VAS. Lack of awareness about VAS, how to subscribe and unsubscribe amongst majority of Indian mobile users is also a deterrent to growth of higher end VAS services. Higher cost of MVAS services also contributes to slower adaptation of the higher end MVAS services. For, example a P2P SMS costs Re. 1 on an average, on the other hand downloading a ringtone via SMS costs Rs.3 – Rs.5.
When it comes to enterprises, the major challenge lies in having seamless interoperability across various service providers. Enterprises would receive content from different service providers thereby creating a need to integrate them seamlessly with the existing infrastructural and operational applications. The other concern here relates to security issues, content loss and delivery of unsolicited contents. Further, lack of proper authenticated infrastructure between operators and aggregators relating to content download and weak copyright protection are two major regulatory challenges that the industry will face in India.
Regards
Nitin