Vodafone Figures Out They Need To Encourage 3G Use

from the shocking,-absolutely-shocking! dept

The various wireless carriers out there have a history of not having the slightest clue when it came to pricing new services. They always hope they can charge a premium for some brand new service. What happens, of course, is very few people buy into it. You get the early adopters, and no one else sees why they should bother. Instead, they need to start realizing that there's a balance. You need to encourage people to actually try the new service. Putting a huge upfront hurdle doesn't help matters. So, it's a bit surprising that Vodafone appears to (maybe? possibly?) have figured this out with their 3G datacard. Instead of putting up a 300 Euro purchase price for the laptop card, they're now selling the card for a single Euro (that's right, one Euro is all it takes). In other words, someone explained to them the concept of a loss leader. Sure, they're losing money on each card sale, but the whole point of having a 3G offering is not for the carrier to make money on selling phones and cards, but off of the service. How else do you encourage people to use the service than to make the upfront hurdle as cheap as possible? It's similar to what they do with subsidized phones, of course, but so far most carriers seemed so focused on how they could charge extra for every bit of the 3G experience that it's still surprising to see this happen. It's a smart move, even if the article goes on and on about how it must mean they're having trouble getting people to adopt the service. New services need promotions and low customer hurdles. That seems to be exactly what Vodafone is going for.