Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Why Mobile Phones Offer Complex Choices
Mobile phone is part of today's fast moving society. If you ever stop for a quick breather and look back 10 years, do not you ever wonder how you managed to live without a mobile phone?
Today, in you are running late for a meeting, no one needs to be in doubt what is holding you or how long it would be before you get there. If train is late, or children need collecting or what ever, people just reach out for their pockets or purses and make a quick phone call. Problem solved.
Because every one wants or needs a mobile phone, lots of companies have entered into the market to provide them with just that. A new industry has sprung up and developed fully in the last 10 years where none existed. Telecommunications industry directly serving consumers with mobile phones is worth billions in most developed countries.
Competition has kept the prices relatively low. Mobile phones are within most peoples' reach, whether you want a mobile phone tariff on a fix term 12 or 18 month contract or on pay as you use terms.
But the competition has increased complexity that often comes when lots of companies are vying for consumer's attention and therefore offering hi or her with lots of choices. For example, there are 7 main mobile phone operators, including Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile. They control their mobile phone frequencies and charge people for the use of the air time. To enable people to do so, they bundle the air time with mobile phones.
With an impressive number of suppliers of mobile phone suppliers, consumer is spoilt for choice. The manufactures of mobile phones include house hold names like Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola and others.
Following the classic marketing, telecommunication companies have divided the consumers into various segments. Examples may be teenagers, early 20s, in their 30s and so on. From experience they know that teenagers' usage of mobile phone is not the same as people in their late 20s and so on. So the package targeted at teenagers may include features that they prefer but exclude what is low on their priority list. Sounds logical, is not it?
It is. But if we also look at how many other segments there are in the market: professionals, travellers, business people, working women, house wives, children, octogenarians and so on. They all have their own requirements. A business person requires a tariff that allows him to call anyone at any time during the day. Some people prefer to socialise by having a long chat after finishing work. And some other people's requirement never goes beyond an occasional 10 second call home to let the other half know that train is running late.
To cater for varied requirements, handset manufacturers have responded by producing phones that cater for these segments.
If you have shopped around for a mobile phone recently, you may have noticed the variety of tariffs and phones. But the complexity is much more complex than this. To entice consumers, phone companies offer inducements like freebies in the form of extra minutes in the first few months, half price line rental, free phone or Bluetooth set and so on. Their affiliates may offer even different and better, deals.
Can you see the complexity one faces when looking for a 'perfect' phone and tariff combination. We did a market survey and estimated that there are more than 20,000 mobile phones deal combinations were available in UK alone at any one time.
Sifting through all these deals for one that suits you best is like looking for a needle in a haystack. There has to be a simple way. That is where TopMobiles4u comes in.
We created a site that can compare most mobile phone deals available in UK in less than 10 seconds. Site does not sell any thing. It just compares the mobile phone tariffs and models according to your requirements and presents well laid out table with phone pictures in under seconds.
I know the UK mobile phone market inside out. Ever increasing choice was getting confusing even for me. What about people who need to buy a mobile phone once in a while?
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