My marketing plan for TSTT
18/12/07 00:03 Filed in: BitDepth+
At a
recent meeting with Trevor Deane, TSTT's VP for Broadband and
Joseph Herdé, the company's head of broadband marketing, I was
asked what I thought of the company's strategy for marketing their
products.
My response was possibly too succint for politeness.
"Madness." I said.
Here's why. TSTT currently has two Internet services in the field, an older, much maligned service called HSIA (High Speed Internet Access) and the spiffy new Blink, accompanied by techno jingles, computers prizes and full page advertising.
For some reason that I cannot adequately understand, the company persists in treating these two services as if they were completely different, unrelated products, as divorced from each other as the Roses.
I've encountered this capacity for corporate schizophrenia before when I tried to have discounted Internet access on one phone line and the SmartChoice plan I was signing up for on another. Nobody short of a VP could seem to understand that these two phone lines were coming to the same house, were paid for by the same person and were being offered by the same company and the impossibility of such a thing was only overturned by executive veto.
This, then, is my appeal to executive commonsense, which I hope might be followed by executive action.
For the month of November 2007, I was billed for my use (for the most part, during the time it wasn't down) of the company's HSIA service to the tune of TT$400.
This self-same 256k download service is now being offered by the same company as part of the Blink package of options at TT$79.
I cannot sign up for Blink because of the same connection problem that has led to hours of downtime on my lines over the last year (I hear the word "Lightspeed" a lot, I have a general idea of what it means but I don't care).
So through no fault of my own, I cannot enjoy higher speeds for the price, but there seems no good reason why I can't have the lower speed I'm stuck with for the current market value of a 256k connection as set by the provider.
By the time this is posted, TSTT will have cut the cost of their HSIA service in half. This is a sop and avoids the central issue.
From the moment Blink was introduced, HSIA should have been taken out to the back of TSTT's head office, made to kneel down by the big cable reels and been shot in the head. Twice. An advertisement showing James Gandolfini doing this would have been great.
Everyone then would have been automatically switched to the Blink service at the lower rate and as fast as they service was introduced, each current user would have been offered a free one month trial upgrade to the equivalent of the TT$400 package with appropriate print mailers and e-mail notifications.
I base this strategy on the wild idea that most people budget for their Internet access and are more likely to keep paying the same sum for a tenfold increase in speed than to pay less for the same speed.
If a customer hasn't signed up in 30 days, drop the promotional package to the data rate applicable to the $200 package and give the customer another 30 days to try the speed out, along with "time is running out" mailers and e-mails.
Anyone who hasn't switched by then can then be dropped back to the lowest package and left to enjoy that data rate.
I suggested this to Messrs Herdé and Deane at our meeting and was told that the feeling at official corporate meetings was that people would opt for the lowest price.
Ergo, madness.
My mother, who was forced to upgrade from the free dial-up service I allowed her to use for almost five years to HSIA service would not go back to dial-up even if she got it for free. You could probably pay her to use it, but otherwise, no chance. And she's over 70.
What's a family with children going to do?
Argue economy when nobody can log on to their favorite Flash based websites or look at YouTube videos anymore in realtime?
My response was possibly too succint for politeness.
"Madness." I said.
Here's why. TSTT currently has two Internet services in the field, an older, much maligned service called HSIA (High Speed Internet Access) and the spiffy new Blink, accompanied by techno jingles, computers prizes and full page advertising.
For some reason that I cannot adequately understand, the company persists in treating these two services as if they were completely different, unrelated products, as divorced from each other as the Roses.
I've encountered this capacity for corporate schizophrenia before when I tried to have discounted Internet access on one phone line and the SmartChoice plan I was signing up for on another. Nobody short of a VP could seem to understand that these two phone lines were coming to the same house, were paid for by the same person and were being offered by the same company and the impossibility of such a thing was only overturned by executive veto.
This, then, is my appeal to executive commonsense, which I hope might be followed by executive action.
For the month of November 2007, I was billed for my use (for the most part, during the time it wasn't down) of the company's HSIA service to the tune of TT$400.
This self-same 256k download service is now being offered by the same company as part of the Blink package of options at TT$79.
I cannot sign up for Blink because of the same connection problem that has led to hours of downtime on my lines over the last year (I hear the word "Lightspeed" a lot, I have a general idea of what it means but I don't care).
So through no fault of my own, I cannot enjoy higher speeds for the price, but there seems no good reason why I can't have the lower speed I'm stuck with for the current market value of a 256k connection as set by the provider.
By the time this is posted, TSTT will have cut the cost of their HSIA service in half. This is a sop and avoids the central issue.
From the moment Blink was introduced, HSIA should have been taken out to the back of TSTT's head office, made to kneel down by the big cable reels and been shot in the head. Twice. An advertisement showing James Gandolfini doing this would have been great.
Everyone then would have been automatically switched to the Blink service at the lower rate and as fast as they service was introduced, each current user would have been offered a free one month trial upgrade to the equivalent of the TT$400 package with appropriate print mailers and e-mail notifications.
I base this strategy on the wild idea that most people budget for their Internet access and are more likely to keep paying the same sum for a tenfold increase in speed than to pay less for the same speed.
If a customer hasn't signed up in 30 days, drop the promotional package to the data rate applicable to the $200 package and give the customer another 30 days to try the speed out, along with "time is running out" mailers and e-mails.
Anyone who hasn't switched by then can then be dropped back to the lowest package and left to enjoy that data rate.
I suggested this to Messrs Herdé and Deane at our meeting and was told that the feeling at official corporate meetings was that people would opt for the lowest price.
Ergo, madness.
My mother, who was forced to upgrade from the free dial-up service I allowed her to use for almost five years to HSIA service would not go back to dial-up even if she got it for free. You could probably pay her to use it, but otherwise, no chance. And she's over 70.
What's a family with children going to do?
Argue economy when nobody can log on to their favorite Flash based websites or look at YouTube videos anymore in realtime?
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