During the performed analysis author has identified that company uses a number of communication strategies described in the previous section. The demographics of clients using “ONE” service varies from 12 to 35 years old, the majority of users being between 17 to 25. Predominantly users are young people with a disposable income who can afford to dedicate not significant part of their budget for the extension of possibilities of their mobile phones. The clients pay for downloading music, visuals, and games to their mobile phones. This service would have been not popular if the company didn’t make a thorough analysis of their clientele. Understanding who the clients are, company has adopted a mix of communication strategies, currently in their communications portfolio there are the following types of practices:
Advertising
Sales promotion
Direct marketing
3.1. Advertising of “ONE”
Hence the segment are young people which are usually technologically advanced company advertises its services on internet portals which are predominantly visited by young population. The decision making on where to advertise arises from the management of ONE, however there are several tools which company applies as a means of communication. One of such is professional statistical systems, which are known as search engines and counters. A lot of companies are listed in such catalogues and the statistical system as Top.lv (Latvian equivalent of Yahoo!) provides an information on traffic of a particular webpage. In its turn, ONE monitors the trendiest web pages of its customer segment and purchases advertising space.
During authors observation it was noticed that the largest stake of company ONE advertising materials is predominantly found at World Wide Web, however, company doesn’t neglect other advertising techniques. For example, advertising at newspapers and magazines favored by the target group has been also a practice (ЭN, Chas, Delfi etc.). As was cited by US Economist (2001) advertising can be enjoyable for the customer because if designed in the right way it has a potential to impress and entertain. In authors’ opinion, “the right way” is the advertisements which are preferred by the customers, and in order to communicate efficiently through advertising performing marketing research sounds reasonable (discussed in section 4.3). The marketing move in advertising practice was noticed; during its seven years of operations company has established an image (or association) for customers with company’s services. A character without a name in a form of animated girl always advertises new services provided by “ONE” (a variety of advertising materials of company “ONE” is available in Appendice 4). Thus, by creating a virtual advertising character which is a unique copyright customers and masses now recognize the character and associate it with the company.
3.2. Sales promotion
“ONE” emphasizes on additional value which customer receives when purchasing the mobile service. Comparing predominantly with SMS services of mobile operators the value is obvious:
Baltic providers
of SMS Services
Provider
LMT
TELE2
ONE.LV
Price per sms message
0.08 EUR
0.05 EUR
0.01 EUR
Figure 3.2. Comparison of prices on sms messages within the area of The Baltic States (after author’s secondary research)
In order to motivate consumption and deliver the value message to the customer, company “ONE” provides three free sms to every registered user of their website. Mainly, promotion takes place within the hypermedia, because the business is concentrated in World Wide Web. It is difficult to state whether sales promotions of the group are effective in comparison with advertising. As was stated by Zenor et al (1998) advertising is a long-term brand building activity, whereas sales promotions are short term sale incentives. Taking into account the above described action of “ONE” where company distributes its commodity units in form of sms messages (hypothetically company decreases its capacity because for the company this product is not free) advertising practices can be also subjective due to the fact that they are budget demanding.
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