Sean Weller

Director of Strategy, Seattle

Possible

Sean.Weller@possible.com 

Insight | Experience

Brand building

now depends

on experience

Brand experience is arguably the most important element of brand building—especially for telecom providers. Yet, the telcos have historically struggled with delivering superior brand experiences, while companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook are raising the bar—developing simple hardware devices that connect to your TV, offering live and on-demand entertainment services, spending billions on original content and letting you consume with it in effortless ways. As telcos evolve beyond just pipes into integrated media and entertainment companies, they will increasingly compete with the “big four,” and they will need to reset customer expectations to provide simpler, more valuable, more personal experiences.

Ryan Johnson

Vice President & Account Director

BAV Group

Ryan.Johnson@bavgroup.com 

Insight | Beyond Category

Brand leaders

think outside

their category

We’ve been thinking a lot about catalyst and disruptor brands both inside and outside of telecoms. All brands start someplace. But, at a macro level, the brands that are succeeding, both legacy brands and upstarts, are the ones that are moving away from being highly correlated with the legacy stalwarts in their industry. Brands that will be successful are the ones that are not thinking exclusively about their category – but instead recognizing the broader brandscape as both opportunity and as competition. If you’re a telecom provider you shouldn’t be thinking about your business as being solely a telecom provider, but instead identifying ways to become less correlated with category peers and think about the business more broadly. In telecoms, this could be expanding into content or platform, not just infrastructure and services. In a category as broad as telecoms, the brand itself can become the fabric linking formerly disparate categories together. In our research, we find that consumers closely correlated a major telecom brands not just with cable providers, but also with content producers, wireless providers, and content platforms. These close correlations indicate opportunities for expansion that leverages existing infrastructure, as consumers already perceive telecoms as similar to these other categories.

Kari Jackson-Kloenther

Managing Partner, Media

MediaCom

KJK@mediacom.com 

Insight | Data

Telecoms may

face consumer

data concerns

Data security will become an important trend to watch for telecoms. Basically every single piece of digital data gets routed through telecom providers, and up to now people haven’t generally thought too much about it.  With people starting to question the personal data provided to and collected by technology companies like Google and Facebook, it is only a matter of time before the broader cyber security question around telecom data in general arises.  The point is not only whether people trust the telecoms with their data; it’s also a question of how people can protect their own data, free of cyber threats and other data protection issues, with the help of their telecom provider.

Carlos Werner

Senior Director

Kantar Consulting

Carlos.Werner@kantarconsulting.com 

Insight | IoT

Telecoms seek

leadership

role in IoT

Every carrier talks about the Internet of Things and Smart Cities, but the telecom brands tend to be vague when talking about how these developments will happen. The conversation on these topics is part of the telecom providers’ global citizenship positioning. The carriers want to own this space because ownership is not determined. And the carriers, with access to the home, are well positioned for ownership.