The Savvy Marketplace

A common thinking among “Marketing people ” is that for every product that enters the market there must be a path, a target, a need ( real or created) that decides how the product must enter the consumer’s life, which part of the population is more likely to go for it, which niche it is going to fill and, most important “…certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being so.” and that is the final issue: the price.

Depending on those anavoidable patterns a product is more or less ready for a certain market.

High technologically devices, the ones that offer perfect quality and cost a fortune will target the elitarian market, where the price has not big importance (on the contrary, if the price would be lower than what certain people can afford, the product wouldn’t reach them) since it means luxury.

When a product ceases to be luxury and begins to be a need, then the mass market is ready. The product can enter 60% of consumers’ lives, reach easily a good upgrade in the percentage and become ” The New Product of the year 200….”.

Let’s consider the VoIP market.

Prior to recent theoretical work on social needs, the usual purpose of a product invoked individual (social) behaviors. We now know that these assumptions are not completely wrong.

Wrong would be NON considering them.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole offer will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no one of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

Now, thanks to a series of breakthroughs in network theory by researchers we know that power law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options. We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding - most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot.

In other words: give to the people the choice among desktop phones and mobile phones and the majority will choose what they think more convenient, in spite of the cost of the service.

In a way the cost of the service is the only left advantage in favour of the fixed telephony.

If the price was the same the desktop phones would disappear from the life of the average consumer (mass market consumer).

To see how freedom of choice could create such unequal distributions, consider a hypothetical population of a thousand people, each picking their favorite way of telecommunication. One way to model such a system is simply to assume that each person has an equal chance of liking each kind of telephony. This distribution would be basically flat - most kind of telephony will have the same number of people listing it as a favorite. A few will be more popular than average and a few less, of course, but that will be statistical noise. The bulk of the telephony will be of average popularity, and the highs and lows will not be too far different from this average. In this model, neither the quality of the voice, the availability, the design of the device nor other people’s choices have any effect; there are no shared tastes, no preferred genres, no effects from marketing or recommendations from friends.

This is the mass market of VoIP as dreamed and forecasted by most hardware producers.

People would choose VoIP in spite of the fact that the systems are not intercommunicating, the available phones are just desktop phones, most of the population doesn’t have a “Flat rate DSL” and some do not even have a decent connection, (just one ” UP to…) and just because VoIP means cutting cost.

They have a few wrong assumptions:

1. Most of the people want to save calling internationally

2. Most of the people will use a cheap Flat rate connection

3. Most of the people know how to handle a computer or a network, and so solve all the eventual problems that could arise.

But they do not consider that:

1. Most people call locally and just a few once in a while internationally.

2. Most of the people do not have a cheap flat rate Internet

3. Most of the people are not IT experts.

Besides people’s choices do affect one another. If we assume that any kind of telephony chosen by one user is more likely, by even a fractional amount, to be chosen by another user, the system changes dramatically.

If Robert (our average mass market consumer) likes to have a phone in his pocket, available mostly anywhere, it is very likely that Mary would like the same.

Is VoIp ready for the “Mass Market”?

The answer could be No and Yes.

What would VoIP offer more than the existing several choices?

1. Price. Telephone calls would be completely free of charge among two IP phones ( and that believe me is a GREEEEAT THING when you try it)

2. The never enough considered satisfaction to be able to ref..ck who f..cked us for many years…

What would VoIP telephony need to be #1 spot in the curve?

1. A reliable PORTABLE Phone that doesn’t need millions of Hot Spot’s to work.

2. A reliable, cheap flat rate internet connection anywhere for everybody.

If ONE could put these patterns together, THEN VoIP would really have the chance to be #1.

See my website: http://www.worldonip.com or contact me patrizia@worldonip.com

About The Author

Patrizia is an ebooks publisher. See also http://www.easymediabroadcast.com

patrizia@worldonip.com

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The days of expensive hotel phone bills are over, with the rise of more and more hotels offering broadband Internet services. With the broadband connection, users can use Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP to stay connected with their family.
This is especially good news to oversea travelers. Some hotels do have a charge to access the Internet.

The Residence Inn in New Haven Conneticutt has become one of the first hotels to offer free VoIP service to their customers. Adam Dubroff of TravelGlue, the company that wired the Residence Inn for VoIP, told CNN. “Until now, hotel guests have paid a premium for the convenience of the long distance service, which was appropriate when there were no cell phones and it really was a convenience.”

Dubroff continued, “But as technology has developed, it has become an old business model and the prices charged have been rendered exorbitant. Now, because of VoIP, there is an opportunity to provide guests with a phone service for free and I think this will be the norm in the future.”

The Wynn in Las Vegas has taken the VoIP technology to the fullest extreme offering reservations, hotel information and more right from a touch screen VoIP phone. Plus when a user accesses the broadband Internet the Wynn offers, they can use their personal VoIP service for only the cost of the Internet access.

Many VoIP providers allow users to take their service with them, wherever they travel. Skype offers a free VoIP that can be used directly with a users computer and broadband Internet connection, therefore allowing it to be accessed virtually anywhere and anytime. No additional equipment is needed, however Skype users can only call Skype customers for free. Calling regular phone numbers result in a charge.

Vonage allows customers to travel with their phone adapter that plugs into their computer and broadband Internet, giving them the same Internet phone service that they receive at home. Additional charges may incur from Vonage based on the monthly plan the user currently is enrolled in.

“Communication was always an issue with expats working overseas. Satellite telephones have helped me to keep in touch with my family but the per minute cost prohibited long or chatty calls,” says Thomas Drown, a geologist working in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. “Now, I can talk to anyone in the world who has either a phone or an Internet connection. Now I can call my mom in Canada from my western Mongolia ger field office any time of the day or night for just eight cents a minute.”

For more information regaurding VOIP services check out http://www.calling-plans.com/broadband-phone.html or http://www.page-fx.com/internet-phone/.