Is Nokia your mobile operator or what?

The Feature is running a great writeup on the findings of a survey by Unisys that was published during a telecommunications conference that took place last week.
The youth segment is growing rapidly amongst the users of mobile phones – we can all see it. More and more kids and “youngsters” sport a mobile phone and frequently, it is the newest model on the market. Handphones also exhibit more and more features “to play with” – the manufacturers believe that the youth “knows it all, wants it all and demands for more”. Is this true?

Not so: While the youth clearly "...understand technology better than most, most reject techno-jargon and consider MMS to be a gimmick they don’t need. They have deep pockets, but are heavily cost-conscious and overwhelmingly choose their provider on the basis of price. They are fickle, lack loyalty, switch providers often and have multiple SIM cards."

And operators were shocked to find out that the youth believes that the brand of their handphone is equivalent with the one that provides the service. Like - Nokia is my operator in the Philippines instead of Smart Communications or Samsung is the one in Malaysia, instead of Celcom. Okay, the examples are made up, but to give you the numbers: "Over 75% of respondents in the Unisys study thought Nokia was their service provider.

That’s how little they know or care about operator brand."
May be it is because their parents pay the bill, may be they really don’t know better, but whatever it is, can operators dismiss the findings?
Operators across the world also push services and content to their users.

Frequently, they hope that the youth follow the Japanese examples where such services took off. However, the study found out that the youth actually "want cheap, easy-to-understand service bundles that couple lots of voice minutes with even more SMS. While there is growing excitement around music services and ringtones, this doesn’t transfer (yet) to more advanced mobile data offers."
This means that the youth appears to still reject MMS services - it is growing but not in the manner the operators want it to be. They don't necessarily see a sense for it - it is "not cool", so to speak.

So forget about rapid growth rates (well, may be not really) – we wrote yesterday that fixed line service operator are in trouble – it seems that mobile phone operators also need to take a hard look at their business model.