CASE STUDY ANALYSIS ON NTT DoCoMo: Marketing i-mode

ANALYSIS

There is one simple word to describe this case, and the word is “RADICAL” . From radical ideas leading to radical technologies, from radical ways to market the technology.

We can safely say that the i-mode idea was an immense success, from 2 M subscribers 30 M subscriber’s in just 2 years from launch is a feat that is comparable to none. NTT launched this revolutionary service to reduce the existing load on their wireless spectrum but even they did not have an idea on the phenomenon, they had given birth to.

It is clear from the success that the trio understood clearly the customer’s need at that time and also the value that the customer was expecting.
Right from the start, the trio defied the regular rules of the industry to achieve one single goal – to gain new subscribers whilst delivering value to the customer. The concept of the service, the pricing, the content available, the billing structure, the hardware used to access the service were all conceptualized and developed keeping in mind the convenience to the user and were responsible for the success of the product.

The whole concept caused a paradigm shift in the way the Japanese telecom industry operated, from adopting easy transmittable data standards, to the ease of use of the phone developed to provide the i-mode service, this shift actually brought to the customer the value they wanted. The value offered to the consumer was immense from the aspect that DoCoMo went in for extremely strategic and valuable tie-ups like financial services, airlines, hotel, retail, and news, they also tied up with the less serious content providers like horoscope, tones etc. We can say that in terms of content the company focused on providing value content to the customers. From hardware perspective, they worked closely with the vendors to ensure the specific design and weigh requirements were met.

In my opinion, the i-mode concept would not do well in outside of Japan at that point of time mainly on account of the following factors: The services required for i-mode to work were very expensive at the time and also there was a massive lack in content available to run the service primarily due lack of foresight on the part of the content providers as they did not see any profit potential. Europe was a different market completely and there was a stark difference in the consumer behaviour and available technologies. People were SMS as it was cheaper than voice calls, whereas in the US, the consumers were more likely to use the PC for Internet service and not their cell phones. Also, the carriers existing in these countries were unwilling to open their infrastructures to the service providers as most of the users were business users and the carriers wanted to maintain quality by controlling the content. In this regard, carriers in both markets are targeting business users and other early adopters of mobile internet tech.