O2 announced last year that they were launching NTT DoCoMo’s highly successful i-mode in the UK (as well as Germany and Ireland) and recently declared this Saturday (October 1st) as launch day.
However, it wasn’t too clear exactly what their plans are until now, vis a vis the existing O2 Active brand and 4.2 million customer base. The implication so far has been that they’d sort of slide i-mode into the market and see what kind of uptake it would get.
But according to the International Herald Tribune today, O2 are backing the launch with a ¨£20 million ($35 million) advertising and marketing campaign. Make no mistake, this is a very, very large campaign in European terms. And historically, this is O2′s largest since the demerger from BT in 2001, according to Russ Shaw, their Marketing Director.
This indicates to me that O2 are viewing i-mode as a a key strategic part of their business and actually more important than O2 Active in the longer term. In fact, I think they see it as a way to leapfrog the leading brand, Vodafone’s Live!, altogether.
This would also imply that they’re going to aggressively encourage O2 Active users to trade up to i-mode in the immediate future.
i-mode is meant to deliver what WAP promised 5 years ago – the internet of your phone. Initially, O2 have bundled about 100 leading sites on there and enabled it with email. What’s more, they have announced the best rev share arrangements with content owners outside the Far East – an unprecedented 86%.
On the downside of the launch, email is expected to be charged at 10p (17c) each – presumably so as not to cannibalise sms traffic. And net access is expected to be ¨£3 ($5.30) per MB, equivalent to 100 pages. This seems a shame to me, as surely this would be a great opportunity to launch an “all you can eat”, really simple data plan and really stick it to the competition. Surely, one reason that’s holding back data is that people want to avoid Bill Shock syndrome?
Saturday will reveal all, including their pricing. But, every journey starts with a small step and O2 seem to have made several big strides from what we know so far.
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