Wireless carriers are about to get an education, one that San Francisco-based Telephia Inc. believes is long overdue.
Founded in February 1998, by Tom Frangione and John Oyler-both with extensive backgrounds in telecommunications and start-up companies-the privately owned company plans to offer carriers the ability to completely integrate information on market share, network quality, brand awareness, product offerings and promotions, allowing them to more effectively analyze the marketplace and their marketing plans.
“We want to become the A.C. Nielsen of the wireless world,” said Alan K. Brune, Telephia’s vice president of marketing. “Wireless carriers today are spending an enormous percentage of their sales and marketing budgets on acquiring customers, but they spend significantly less than other competitive industries on understanding the effectiveness of their individual sales and marketing efforts.
“The way that we’re doing this is by basically building a network of fixed receivers out of each marketplace. So to a certain degree, when the cellular providers are out there, they set up a network that is providing communication between their switch and their cell sites and their handsets, and we basically have an overlay system that is also out in the respective metropolitan areas we want to get information on. We then download the information that we receive on a daily basis into a major data warehouse, and then mine that information for market share and the share of usage,” said Brune.
“The key is we don’t just do it for one player … we basically are doing it on a syndicated model so we’re going to provide this for all the players at the same time, thereby reducing costs for what they’re receiving and providing an integrated package of all the components,” he said. “Our goal is at the first of the month, two weeks after the month has started, we’d like to give our customers a flash report-`Here’s what’s going on so that you know whether you should do something.’ “
Telephia said it initially is offering in Portland, Ore., and Boston its four products-Market Trac, Program Trac, Info Trac and Net Q-and will extend its services to other markets throughout next year.
Market Trac continuously determines market and usage share in each wireless market, calculates relative gross gain activity and delivers the data to carriers on a monthly basis.
Program Trac reports market-level media activity and expenditures and rate plan and promotion descriptions. Through exclusive partnerships, Telephia said it collects advertising occurrence and spending and creative data across all major media types, including television, radio, newspaper and magazines, also on a monthly basis.
Through its partnership with Harris Interactive, Telephia’s Info Trac uses the far-reaching capabilities of the Internet to survey customers and gather data. The 50,000 wireless subscribers surveyed will provide usage and customer profiles, customer satisfaction, purchasing behaviors, product development, brand awareness, switching and loyalty data to carriers on a quarterly basis.
Net Q monitors quarterly for carriers voice quality, grade of service, dropped calls and system access-on their own network and their competitors’-through drive-by tests.
Telephia monitors and gathers data through a network of computer modules placed at key locations throughout each of the markets they cover.
“The smart thing to do, which is hopefully the thing that we’re doing, is to put the hardware in the areas where there is the highest usage, and you’ll see the greatest number of phones. So, in San Francisco, we’ll put it beside the Golden Gate Bridge, we’ll put it beside the Bay Bridge. We’ll put it on all the traffic corridors where you have half a million people streaming in and out of the city a day. That way we don’t have to set up 50 of these receivers, but we can set up 10 receivers or so in a geographic area to be able to capture the respective phone numbers that we need for a market share,” said Brune.
The receivers-about the size of two desktop computers-monitor the various cell sites in a market, gather the appropriate data, and send it to a central location to be sorted, analyzed and compiled into a format marketing employees can use. The raw data also is provided, said the company.
“We are gathering an enormous amount of data,” Brune said. “We are collecting basically a CD’s worth of information from every one of the receivers in a day’s period of time.”
Telephia’s service is provided on a subscription basis and costs about the same as what wireless carriers are spending now on market research, only Telephia’s data can be given on a much more timely monthly basis, Brune contended. The data also is gathered at consistent time periods, making it easier to compare and contrast.
In the future, the company said it expects to provide panel data as well as point-of-sale information.
