I recently attended two events for the mobile industry: Mobile Asia in Hongkong and an IIR event on Customer Segmentation and Intelligence in London. I had the opportunity to listen to numerous speeches, and two themes in particular caught my attention:
· The necessity to use microsegmentation to reach and engage consumers and
· The challenge and opportunity of data services and applications for mobile operators
As Garrett Johnston from MTS Russia put it In his presentation in Mobile Asia, the key to operators’ success in the future lies in the long tail of brands – and these are the brands of their application partners. How can operators matchmake between the varying and versatile needs of their customers and the supply of niche applications? Analytics was seen as the answer by many, but several open questions remain on the implementation, especially on truly making analytics part of marketing processes.
Operators have worked on segmentation models for a long time already. The projects have been long, cumbersome and internally focused (!). Are these static segmentation models going to help in selling a large variety of products, services and applications to subscribers? Yes and no. When resuming the key learnings at the IIR event on segmentation, one of the groups came up with the idea of hierarchical segmentation where the operator works with a few high-level segments on a strategic level, but uses dynamic segmentation with more variables as input on a tactical level . I believe there is food for further investigation in this idea – more flexibility to really engage the versatile consumers with niche marketing, offerings and flexible pricing through microsegmentation, based on strong but easy-to-use analytics.
