What's the score on mobile data services?
Klaus-Ulrich Feiler, Dr. Stefan Rassau
2005
Modern mobile products can do almost anything. You can use them to download movies, receive and send pictures, music, e-mails and text messages, engage in instant messaging, and browse the Internet. You can use them for m-commerce, m-banking and m-payments or to play with your friends online. You can use them to steer, inform and track your workforce. And, of course, you can use them simply to make phone calls from anywhere.
Yet despite this plethora of mobile data services, the most basic ones (such as text messaging) are invariably the most popular. Other mobile data offerings, especially advanced services such as multimedia messaging (MMS) and e-mail, have hitherto met with very disappointing take-up rates.
In producing this study, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants therefore asked two key questions: Why do consumers behave the way they do toward mobile data services? And how can that behavior be changed? In the course of our investigations, we identified four success factors that can boost mobile data solution sales.
- Simple and transparent service packages and pricing structures, including low entry-level prices with no hidden costs (i.e. a transparent total cost of ownership)
- Availability of suitable products: Any mobile data service is bound to fail if the product does not make it fun to use
- Standardized simplicity: A mobile solution must be compatible with other systems and products that the target group uses
- More bandwidth: Mobile data services will not succeed unless UMTS penetrates the market quickly
While these success factors may seem obvious, they are far from standard practice in the industry. We speak from experience: Roland Berger Strategy Consultants has completed a wide range of projects for European mobile network operators in the past. And mobile data services remain a strong focus of our daily work. In late 2004 and early 2005, we therefore conducted a survey of mobile data services in Europe to enrich our project experience with fresh Study insights gleaned from industry experts and practitioners.
The survey included a series of interviews with managers at mobile network operators (MNOs) in seven countries. Most of the interviewees hold positions as marketing or product managers for mobile data services. Our study begins by examining where the industry is at today. It then highlights those issues to which mobile network operators must apply themselves over the next 12 to 15 months if they are to make good on the exceptional promise that the mobile data business still holds out. It ends with our proposal of an "Agenda 2006" to let mobile network operators reap the long-overdue rewards of mobile data business.
