3GScottishUser
20th May 2005, 08:15 PM
From Ovum Research (20/05/2005):
Today, Vodafone announced an important new service called Vodafone Simply. This is basically two new phones that just do voice and text (and also receive, but not send, picture messages). They have been designed to be as easy as possible to use, for a market segment which Vodafone believes is currently under-served: people in their 40s, 50s and 60s for whom money is not generally an obstacle to using mobile - but for whom the phone itself is often a barrier.
The phones, built by French OEM Sagem, have a colour screen and big, widely-spaced number keys. They also have quite a few more keys than most other phones. There's a 'home' key which takes you to the top of the stack if you get lost in the interface, a 'people' key, which takes you to the contact list and a 'message' key which flashes when you've received a text or a voicemail, and takes you straight to the message when you press it. There's also a sliding lock/unlock key. The graphical user interface makes heavy use of words to tell you what's going on: for example, when you slide the key to 'lock', the screen tells you that the phone is now locked, and you have to slide the key back to unlock it. There is context-sensitive help in all parts of the interface.
The Simply phones will retail around the £80 mark on prepaid, and will be free with a contract.
Vodafone Simply is the most important example to date of a trend which, we have long argued, will be one of the biggest influences on the shape of the European mobile industry over the next few years. Vodafone has proved increasingly determined to use its enormous buying power to persuade handset vendors to produce phones that do what Vodafone wants, rather than what the vendors want. The Sharp GX-10, flagship phone for the launch of Vodafone Live!, was the first such handset. A more recent example is the RIM Blackberry 7100v.
But with Simply, Vodafone has raised the game, expanding its role on the handset side in a major way. Phones such as the Sharp GX-10 were exclusive to Vodafone for only a limited period, and the technology inside them remained the property of the vendors, in the conventional way. With the Simply phones, Vodafone owns the interface, and it has been designed to do exactly what Vodafone wants it to.
More particularly, the phone has been designed to do what Vodafone's marketing organisation wants it to. The operator has identified an affluent market segment that is currently under-served, and has commissioned a product which will serve it better. There's nothing new about this idea - that's what marketing departments are supposed to do - but for most of its history the development of mobile telecoms has been led by technology, not by marketing. The shift to a marketing-led process is an important sign that mobile has become a mature business.
Perhaps the most telling examples of the thinking behind Simply are not the phones themselves, but two of the accessories that come with them. The manual is only 28 pages long, and is full of colour photographs showing things such as how to take the cover off the back of the phone. Guy Laurence, Global Terminal & Consumer Marketing Director at Vodafone explained that the phone designers were told that if there were too many features to fit into 28 pages, then they were to remove some features. But my personal favourite idea is the docking pad. Vodafone identified two consistent themes in their customer feedback. People in the target group often forget where in the house they've left their phone, and they forget to charge it. So the Simply phone comes with a small docking pad, which doubles as a phone charger. There's no clever technology here: but it simultaneously answers two important customer needs. Now you know where you left your phone; and when you go to fetch it, it's charged up.
Will Simply succeed? It may well do, but Vodafone has one major challenge to overcome. Ironically (since Simply is the product of the marketing department), that challenge is: how to market it. In order to get what Simply is about, you really have to see it and play with it a bit. That's why Vodafone invited me to a personal briefing on the product, rather than just telling me about it over the phone. So it will be hard to communicate adequately what Simply is about through advertising on TV and in magazines.
The most effective way to sell Simply will be to get prospective customers to go into the phone shop and try it out. The problem is that, as Vodafone has correctly identified, its target demographic is intimidated by phone shops. They are full of advanced technology which these people mostly don't understand and are vaguely threatened by. The staff are young, technology-literate types who they don't want to ask for help, for fear of being patronised or scorned. Basically, as several of Vodafone's focus group members put it, phone shops 'make me feel stupid'. One way of putting that right might be to employ more people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, as the UK supermarket Sainsbury's recently announced it will do. But apparently, Vodafone has no immediate plans in that direction.
By the way, Vodafone explained its advertising strategy to me with the phrase: 'these advertisements will appear in publications that you probably never see'. I appreciate the implied compliment, guys, but you know what? I'll be 43 next week. Maybe your target demographic goes even wider than you think it does!
http://www.ovum.com/go/content/c,56262
Today, Vodafone announced an important new service called Vodafone Simply. This is basically two new phones that just do voice and text (and also receive, but not send, picture messages). They have been designed to be as easy as possible to use, for a market segment which Vodafone believes is currently under-served: people in their 40s, 50s and 60s for whom money is not generally an obstacle to using mobile - but for whom the phone itself is often a barrier.
The phones, built by French OEM Sagem, have a colour screen and big, widely-spaced number keys. They also have quite a few more keys than most other phones. There's a 'home' key which takes you to the top of the stack if you get lost in the interface, a 'people' key, which takes you to the contact list and a 'message' key which flashes when you've received a text or a voicemail, and takes you straight to the message when you press it. There's also a sliding lock/unlock key. The graphical user interface makes heavy use of words to tell you what's going on: for example, when you slide the key to 'lock', the screen tells you that the phone is now locked, and you have to slide the key back to unlock it. There is context-sensitive help in all parts of the interface.
The Simply phones will retail around the £80 mark on prepaid, and will be free with a contract.
Vodafone Simply is the most important example to date of a trend which, we have long argued, will be one of the biggest influences on the shape of the European mobile industry over the next few years. Vodafone has proved increasingly determined to use its enormous buying power to persuade handset vendors to produce phones that do what Vodafone wants, rather than what the vendors want. The Sharp GX-10, flagship phone for the launch of Vodafone Live!, was the first such handset. A more recent example is the RIM Blackberry 7100v.
But with Simply, Vodafone has raised the game, expanding its role on the handset side in a major way. Phones such as the Sharp GX-10 were exclusive to Vodafone for only a limited period, and the technology inside them remained the property of the vendors, in the conventional way. With the Simply phones, Vodafone owns the interface, and it has been designed to do exactly what Vodafone wants it to.
More particularly, the phone has been designed to do what Vodafone's marketing organisation wants it to. The operator has identified an affluent market segment that is currently under-served, and has commissioned a product which will serve it better. There's nothing new about this idea - that's what marketing departments are supposed to do - but for most of its history the development of mobile telecoms has been led by technology, not by marketing. The shift to a marketing-led process is an important sign that mobile has become a mature business.
Perhaps the most telling examples of the thinking behind Simply are not the phones themselves, but two of the accessories that come with them. The manual is only 28 pages long, and is full of colour photographs showing things such as how to take the cover off the back of the phone. Guy Laurence, Global Terminal & Consumer Marketing Director at Vodafone explained that the phone designers were told that if there were too many features to fit into 28 pages, then they were to remove some features. But my personal favourite idea is the docking pad. Vodafone identified two consistent themes in their customer feedback. People in the target group often forget where in the house they've left their phone, and they forget to charge it. So the Simply phone comes with a small docking pad, which doubles as a phone charger. There's no clever technology here: but it simultaneously answers two important customer needs. Now you know where you left your phone; and when you go to fetch it, it's charged up.
Will Simply succeed? It may well do, but Vodafone has one major challenge to overcome. Ironically (since Simply is the product of the marketing department), that challenge is: how to market it. In order to get what Simply is about, you really have to see it and play with it a bit. That's why Vodafone invited me to a personal briefing on the product, rather than just telling me about it over the phone. So it will be hard to communicate adequately what Simply is about through advertising on TV and in magazines.
The most effective way to sell Simply will be to get prospective customers to go into the phone shop and try it out. The problem is that, as Vodafone has correctly identified, its target demographic is intimidated by phone shops. They are full of advanced technology which these people mostly don't understand and are vaguely threatened by. The staff are young, technology-literate types who they don't want to ask for help, for fear of being patronised or scorned. Basically, as several of Vodafone's focus group members put it, phone shops 'make me feel stupid'. One way of putting that right might be to employ more people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, as the UK supermarket Sainsbury's recently announced it will do. But apparently, Vodafone has no immediate plans in that direction.
By the way, Vodafone explained its advertising strategy to me with the phrase: 'these advertisements will appear in publications that you probably never see'. I appreciate the implied compliment, guys, but you know what? I'll be 43 next week. Maybe your target demographic goes even wider than you think it does!
http://www.ovum.com/go/content/c,56262