'If I ran marketing for an Operator'

Link: Marketing Director for the Day at MobHappy.

If I was Marketing Director of a big operator for the day, apart from sorting out their product/service marketing issues, I’d divert 10% – ok, sod it, let’s go for 20% – to grants, initiatives and competitions to stimulate innovation among the developer community and anyone else who could think up new ideas for products, applications and services for mobile phones. It wouldn’t matter if the entrants weren’t technical, as some budget would be earmarked to pay other developers to build these ideas.

I couldn’t agree more with this quote. In fact I’ve sat back quite often over the past few months and wondered just what I’d do in a similar position. I’ve regularly lambasted various companies and the industry in general — and when doing so, I think it’s useful to have some sort of position just in case someone says, ‘Ok, smart alec, what would you have us do?’

And I’d do exactly as Russell says – perhaps slightly differently. From the perspective of a mobile operator, or big telecoms incumbent, I was pondering over the workability of buying a huge big warehouse in the middle of London, something like the Truman Brewery, fititng it out with ‘everything’ a business needs – wifi, communications, reception team to answer phones and the like. I’d then setup a committee of mobile folk — entrepreneurs, technologists, bloggers and the like. An oversight committee.

Now, anyone — absolutely anyone — with a mobile related concept or business idea that meets three basic objectives (e.g. something like 1) encourages users to increase ARPU, 2) uses 3g… 3) pushes the envelope as something new/different), can submit a one page concept overview to this committee.

They’re then invited to a Dragon’s Den style pitch to see if they’re actually any good. Is the idea a load of bull, can they deliver, what is their background etc. As long as they are half decent and clearly committed, they’re then offered office space and support in the Warehouse for £150 a month and a budget of £25,000.

Maybe you offer a stipend of £1,000 a month to each team member to give’em enough money to live while they’re working on their ideas? I dunno.

Anyway, that £25,000 has to be spent internally on services in the Warehouse (PR, marketing, web design, programming resource). So we put all that resource on tap.

They then need to deliver a product and/or service within 3 months. If it’s as good as they say it was going to be, then we agree to market it on the network, put it on the operator portal, something like that. I’d also make my business development team work from there.

Something like this. It wouldn’t cost a lot of money in the context of a mobile operator’s marketing budget. Even if you allocated £1m a month to fund the concept. Imagine what you’d create? You’d develop a hot-house burgeoning with creativity and energy because you’ve freed up developers and entrepreneurs to get on with the business of increasing your customer’s ARPU for you.

When you sit back and think about it, it’s crazy that you’re dependent on ‘industry’ in general to come up with new applications and services, in order to increase your customer spend. Why leave it to chance? Why not guarantee a continuous flow of innovative and new concepts — 100 might go nowhere but 1 or 2 could significantly impact your bottom line.

Definitely needs a heck of a lot more thought anyway.