Question

Topic: Other

Promotional Campaign

Posted by Anonymous on 3/3/2010 at 9:12 AM ET 25 Points
My task is to develop a comprehensive promotional campaign for community payphones. Need to drive public to make phone calls from payphones,emphasise affordability and also looking in the long term include loyalty programme that will encourange more call be made from public pay phone.sales promotion strategies and what I could achieve with each idea will be appreciated.
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  • Posted by Inbox_Interactive on 3/3/2010 at 9:31 AM Accepted
    Is this a real task or is this part of a class project?

    I'm asking because -- and please don't take this wrong -- pay phones are pretty well on the decline, aren't they?

    I was under the impression that the mobile phone has essentially decimated the pay phone business.
  • Posted by Inbox_Interactive on 3/3/2010 at 10:31 AM Member
    This is a tough one, for sure. I mean, phone calls from the street aren't the kind of thing you can really stimulate demand for. Either someone needs to make a call or they don't.

    And if they do, chances are they have a mobile phone...

    I think you either need to find a way to make payphones fun or hip (good luck with that), or you need to make them free.

    I'm really thinking out loud here...how about a promotion where one caller per day will win "$X" randomly?

    Or what about making the calls free but playing a short advertisement before the call is connected (after it's dialed, though)?

    One neat thing about that would be that the calls could be geo-targeted since you know exactly where the phone is, and you also know the time of day that the call is being made. You also know to what area the call is being made.

    If calls were free, you MIGHT be able to convince people that a free public phone is a cheaper alternative if they are in danger of using their minutes and going over their allotment.

    This is a challenge, no doubt!
  • Posted by steven.alker on 3/3/2010 at 11:04 AM Accepted
    This question has arisen before in the context of emerging economies with poor availability or take up of personal land lines and where the cost of owning or using a mobile phone is prohibitive. That narrows down the geography for where your project would have a chance of working.

    Then the key driver is loyalty and the ability to access a large pool of users because they happen to be in the vicinity of a pay-phone, such as outside a factory which uses a lot of manual labour and which bans the use of mobiles even if they were to be affordable. Phone cards sold through a canteen or through a worker collective can work there, but do bear in mind the high costs of maintaining a pay-phone.

    Through vandalism and the need to pay to collect revenues BT estimates the annual cost of each of its phone boxes to be anything from between £3,000 to over £10,000

    Set that as an overhead and a different solution to the problem is usually preferable to a pay-phone!


    Steve Alker
    Xspirt
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