FEATURE CUSTOMER OWNERSHIP
The customer
is always right
The struggle for customer ownership took an interesting turn in 2007, with several
major league non-carrier brands nailing their colours to the mobile mast.
By Sean Jackson
�ustomer ownership seems—on one
level—a non-issue: the mobile network
operators retain the billing relationship,
therefore they own the customer. But
there is more to customer ownership than
being responsible for billing. Brand loyalty,
now more than ever, is difficult for carriers to
foster. In saturated markets, where coverage
is not an issue, fickle consumers are increasingly
likely to have stronger allegiances to a
handset manufacturer or, indeed, a particular
web service.
At November’s Mobile World Congress Asia,
GSMA chairman Craig Ehrlich asked keynote
speakers whether they viewed “over the top”
players’ moves as a concern. China Mobile’s
CEO Wang Jianzhou, said the challenge facing
mobile operators was not only grappling
with issues on the technology front but also
having to deal with a new business model in
which they were being asked to share content
revenues with the new players. He concluded
by saying that he believed that operators could
still keep the mobile operator-centric business
model, since they maintained ownership of
the subscriber.
But it’s not quite so cut and dried. Last year,
Apple crashed the carrier party on a grand
scale, with certain operators bending over
backwards to accommodate the wishes of
Steve Jobs and co. It is widely believed that the
operators that secured exclusive rights on the
54 Mobile Communications International | First for news, best for business
device are returning as much as 40 per cent
of the revenues generated on iPhones, in their
customer base, back to Apple—voice as well
as data. All parties involved have remained
predictably taciturn on the matter. Whatever
the truth on revenue share, readers can be
sure it is an unprecedented cut.
Nokia, meanwhile, announced last year the
launch of a new internet services brand name,
Ovi. To the casual observer, Ovi resembles the
Finnish handset maker’s ill-fated mobile web
portal Club Nokia. The carriers weren’t especially
taken with Nokia’s last attempt to muscle
in on the mobile internet. This time, though, tier
one luminaries such as Vodafone and Telefonica
have partnered with the Finn on Ovi.
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