“Get Paid For Receiving Calls” With Virgin Mobile, India
Virgin Mobile will now be available in India in collaboration with Tata Teleservices, and hopes to garner over 5 million customers in a three year time frame. It will initially be available across 50 cities (in 17 circles) and will cover over 1,000 cities by the end of the year.
“Virgin Mobile is targeting the youth, aged between 15 and 30 years, estimated to be around 400 million, which is almost six times the size of that in the US. The usage of this sector is also high with urban youths’ mobile usage standing at around 360 million minutes compared with the industry average of 160 million minutes, while their SMS usage is four times more than the industry average,” Branson told Business Standard.
Under one of the features being introduced, outgoing calls to any network would be charged at 50 paise a minute and users will get a credit of 10 paise for every incoming call that’s more than a minute long. Such features, coupled with the irreverent positioning that Virgin takes, should sync with the typical collegiate rather well.
Are we going to start seeing a segmentation of service providers by target groups, or a focus on campaigns for different audience segments?
The success of any model depends on how many life stages of your customer can you cater to, which hence increases the time the customer would spend with you, but so far I do not remember any service provider segmenting their offerings along these lines. I wonder why.
Filed under: India, Mobile, News
Richard Branson owned Virgin Group is launching CDMA handsets in partnership with Tata Teleservices.
The company is also bringing in a regime of “getting paid for receiving calls,” while offering local calls at 50 paise per minute [users will get a credit of 10 paise for every incoming call that’s more than a minute long. - case of permission marketing, given TRAI’s DoNotCall registry doesn’t allow one to sell the user database to third-parties?]
TTSL will sell the Virgin Mobile brand and its services in the country and will pay a royalty for every customer it gets. The CDMA major will launch the services initially across 50 cities (in 17 circles) and will cover over 1,000 cities by the end of the year.