Time to look beyond 'baseball bundles'

America's Network,  March, 2005  by Lester Craft

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

"Baseball," as the old Saturday Night Live skit might have put it, "has been very, very good to us."

The all-American sport popularized by Abner Doubleday has supplied the industry with a handy marketing hook applicable to bundling multiple communications services for consumers. Never mind that the baseball comparison in fact broke down after "triple play" - after all, there are only three outs in an inning, which makes "quadruple play" (wireline and wireless phone, Internet access and cable television) a misnomer. We could stay within the rules by switching to "grand slam" to describe the four-way bundle. But the term quadruple play is already too deeply entrenched to change.

Indeed, quadruple play will be with us for a while. As an actual service, it's still in the formative stages. For that matter, much of the industry is still scrambling to make triple play (quadruple play minus wireless) a reality.

From a technology perspective, triple play and quadruple play are driven by convergence. But what makes them especially compelling is that they also provide a nifty marketing strategy with easy-to-understand pricing.

Despite their simple elegance, it's time to start thinking beyond triple and quadruple play. Bundles need not be limited to the "big four" services, or even to direct revenue sources. An example from our own industry is the tactic of giving away a phone to capture the customer. New wireless bundles will arise as messaging, gaming, music and other mobile services take off. Yet another interesting bundle is Time Warner Cable's plan to offer America Online to broadband customers for free.

Equally important, though far less visible, is bundling for business. As pointed out by Kneko Burney, a chief market strategist for In-Stat, "Business customers are establishing 'preferred' vendor relationships and are focusing on buying multiple services from these preferred brands" in order to simplify their buying processes. Defining the right enterprise bundle isn't as simple as the baseball strategy that works so well with consumers. For example, segmentation by business size as well as by vertical industry is critical, Burney points out.

A major aspect of bundling, in its many forms, is its relationship to branding. Given the current wave of consolidation among tier ones, we're in for a wild ride as marketing departments and ad agencies are shuffled and re-shuffled. Most if not all of the newly configured carriers will have to re-tune their branding on the fly, even as they struggle to understand new customer sets while also integrating disparate networks and operations. It makes one wonder what new kinds of bundles await us. After all, everyone likes to hit it over the fence.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Questex Media Group, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning