After weak overseas launches and ever weaker subscriber growth throughout 2002 and 2003, Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo announced earlier this year that users of its mobile media platform, i-mode, outside Japan finally exceeded 2 million. In early July the company boasted that number had grown to over 3 million. The baby i-mode services launched by Dutch cellular carrier and DoCoMo investee KPN in several European markets (and by other Euro partners elsewhere) are finally achieving some degree of success. Overall, i-mode numbers outside Japan remain weak. Not long after DoCoMo's breathless January 2004 announcement at the 3GSM World Congress trade show in Cannes, global mobile leader Vodafone said it had more than 6.8 million customers on its competing Vodafone Live mobile Internet service -- all outside Japan. But there is one market where, for its size, i-mode is quietly doing rather well: France. Prior to French mobile carrier Bouygues Telecom launching i-mode, data services in Europe's largest country were anemic. And with KPN's i-mode already struggling next door in Holland, Belgium and Germany, i-mode's Gallic prospects were not so formidable. France already has its famous Minitel system, a sort of philosophical grandfather of the i-mode Internet concept, but wedded to fixed-line terminals in consumers' homes (and often used to browse adult services or order in dinner). But Minitel growth long since peaked and offers no reason to suspect that Francophone mobilers would need i-mode nor adopt it any faster than their EU cousins. But France's i-mode has taken off due largely to the arrival of better handsets similar to those in Japan, a tight i-mode marketing focus, and an emphasis on a well-defined and controlled portal strategy, all copied faithfully from DoCoMo in Japan. It's widely acknowledged that the early German, Dutch and Belgian i-mode services suffered from poor-quality handsets that, at least initially, didn't even come close to the highly advanced models available in Japan. There was, for example, no i-mode-enabled cell phone available from dominant European leader Nokia when KPN's i-mode started (Nokia released the 3650 a year after KPN's i-mode launch). Until then, frustrated KPN customers had to make do with recycled discards from Japanese makers -- like NEC's N21i, a 120-gram beast with a lackluster 256-color display. Mitsubishi and Toshiba later fielded i-mode handsets for Europe. These, too, were unremarkable. All European markets also feature an existing user base of mobilers used to seamless roaming and universal SMS text messaging. They have little incentive to make the i-mode switch. When KPN started, you couldn't get i-mode data while roaming nor send an i-mode e-mail to your buddies who didn't have the service. The Germans wouldn't switch. Why should the French?
Bouygues senior managers were aware that there had been branding problems and that the challenge of getting sales, development, planning and marketing staff all dancing according to the new i-mode tune were almost too much for KPN. Shortly after KPN's i-mode launch, senior managers admitted that it was a big task to develop i-mode for their networks. Merely aping Japan's i-mode content offerings was proving insufficient. French carrier's exceptional success In January 2004, Bouygues signed up its 500,000th i-moder. The carrier's i-mode subscribers then made up 25 percent of all i-mode users outside Japan, and Bouygues reached this milestone within 12 months of service launch. As of June 2004, Bouygues had 670,000 i-mode subscribers, according to a company representative. Fundamentally, Bouygues seems to have done a better job than the other i-mode carriers at actually cloning the original Japanese i-mode model -- right down to the last pixel. The billing, the content, the overall service envelope, and the evolution toward highly interactive Java content have all been implemented faithful to Tokyo's teachings -- and Gallic i-moders love it. They also love a bargain: For service launch, Bouygues offered steep discounts to new i-moders for two months. Customers received free packets for all mobile Web browsing, e-mail was free, and all downloads from i-mode content providers were free. Launching later than KPN, Bouygues also had the advantage of watching other carriers make mistakes first, says Cedric Nicolas, the i-mode roadmap manager at Bouygues Telecom. "We started our i-mode service eight months after KPN and we learned a lot from their errors, so it was a clear benefit for us." He credits KPN with taking the risk to launch the first overseas i-mode -- a risk he admits was much lower for Bouygues: "They also had the difficulty to manage three national operators." Holland's KPN Mobile, Germany's E-Plus, and Belgium's BASE are all KPN subsidiaries. "This is much more complex than our situation," he says. Bouygues also benefited from a better selection of i-mode handsets. The original clunky NEC N21i was still there, but in addition, a Toshiba model was available shortly after launch. NEC, Toshiba, and Mitsubishi have all since fielded improved versions with better displays just as Bouygues has been turning on the marketing afterburners. A bigger, better fleet of handsets to entice new i-moders has made Bouygues' marketing challenge much more similar to DoCoMo's in Japan. A duplicate marketing strategy At home in Japan, DoCoMo has always been able to emphasize the unity of content branded by i-mode, regardless of the actual content provider. The marketing done by DoCoMo nationwide emphasizes the i-mode brand, not any particular provider's, and benefits all content partners more or less equally. The Bandais and Disneys as well as smaller, unknown providers like Cybird and Index all win from this. "Our mantra was to have as few differences as possible, betting that what had been successful in Japan should also work well in France. And this belief was true," says Bouygues' Nicolas. He explains that i-mode on Bouygues followed the same business model, the same portal strategy, and the same marketing policy as i-mode in Japan: "Internet in your pocket, simple, and for everybody." Speaking at the same show in Cannes where DoCoMo made its "2 million users" announcement, Yves Goblet, deputy CEO of Bouygues Telecom, explained the company has adopted "all" aspects of DoCoMo's original i-mode including technical specifications and marketing strategy. Bouygues devoted 70 staff members to the i-mode launch -- a huge number for a small company -- and created a highly visible marketing campaign. "Sixty percent of our marketing budget was spent on TV," said Goblet, adding that the company had created an i-mode ecosystem in France that is a "duplicate" of the one in Japan. Fifty content providers were in i-mode's launch lineup, with a strong presence from media owners. On the portal, official providers were categorized much the same as those in Japan: News/Weather, Convenient Information, Travel/Transportation Information, Trip Information, Message Services/Chat, Ringing Melodies/Images, Fortune-telling/Games, Shopping, and Banking/Securities. In the News/Weather category, official i-mode providers in France include CNN, Le Parisien, Reuters, Le Figaro, LCI, Le Nouvel Observateur, Meteo France, and several others. There were 220 overall as of February 2004. In contrast, KPN launched its i-mode with a wishy-washy campaign on TV and bus shelter signs highlighting individual provider content channels. Speaking in a July 2002 interview shortly after KPN's launch, Jan Michael Hess, CEO of Berlin-based mobile consultancy Mobile Economy, told about one KPN i-mode TV commercial that showed users accessing the i-mode mobile portal while displaying content provider logos. This emphasized individual providers and their brands at the expense of i-mode -- a mistake not repeated by Bouygues. "KPN only spent (in the) two-figure million euros (range) to bring i-mode to the market; not so much was spent on marketing," says Hess. In Japan, DoCoMo and other carriers spend billions of yen to promote new handsets and services each year. KPN did at least get one part of i-mode marketing right: the cool factor. Hess says i-mode became a sponsor for a popular reality TV program, "Mission Germany," that involved agents running around Germany in a manhunt. Three of the agents used i-mode phones. Nonetheless, i-mode largely fizzled.
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