One of the best things about a career in product management is that you get to interface with several different functional teams – whether it’s within your own organization or your customers’ organization. I work with mobile network operators’ (MNOs) product and marketing teams globally, where the need for innovation varies from one MNO to the next. But one thing remains consistent: the need for product and marketing teams to work together to meet business objectives and make the ‘magic’ happen.
Except, there is no ‘magic’.
It’s the culmination of the right business and customer intelligence, hard work, art and science to arrive at the Marketing Trifecta: providing the right product to the right customer at the right time.
The events generated by devices when people use them on a carrier’s network represent a tremendous amount of data that, when properly understood, can be the key to unanswered questions.
For instance, MNOs who value customer-centric decision-making need reliable customer-driven intelligence to indicate whether the next marketing campaign is justified. This intelligence also helps product teams to build the right product bundles and device requirements.
As new mobile devices are being introduced to the market, other devices are being abandoned by subscribers for these newer options. Without visibility to the connected devices on their network, MNOs are risking a misalignment of their product and marketing strategy by not responding to their subscribers’ behavior.
In fact, in a previous post, I described how MNOs need to strategize using their subscribers’ mobile device abandonment and adoption trends.
Device data is a surrogate for customer behavior.
Marketing and product teams need to understand customers. Since most customers are pretty much joined at the hip with their devices, the best way to understand them is to understand the intelligence produced by their devices.
Mobile device connections have exploded in number over recent years. Understanding the real-time interaction of multi-millions of devices connected to the network is essential for customer segmentation, seeing patterns of device adoption or abandonment, as well as measuring customer loyalty to a brand.
Customer segmentation is key for marketing operations. While some subscribers may move to another manufacturer or operating system, others may upgrade from a feature phone to a smartphone. Loyalty is a great way to segment subscribers before running a targeted campaign. Subscribers showing a high loyalty indicator to a brand and currently using an old device will be more responsive to a marketing promotion on a newer device from the same brand.

Device Intelligence in action.
Analytics tied to device change events reveal the customer’s device churn and adoption trends. Product and marketing teams are enabled with insights that help them understand key indicators for device adoption and align marketing campaigns accordingly.
For example, imagine that you’re trying to reduce your inventory of remaining iPhone 11 devices. They are the last non-5G iPhones and you have a window of opportunity to sell them while 5G smartphones are still very expensive. You need to first understand the drivers for the current iPhone 11 adoption, such as learning the most representative devices characteristics leading to adopting the iPhone 11, which will indicate whether a specific phone model, screen size, network connectivity or other capabilities are driving the iPhone 11 adoption on your network. Once these characteristics are fleshed out, it’s a matter of replicating the model by first identifying the audience showing similar characteristics – those who have the highest propensity to engage in an iPhone 11 upgrade campaign in the upcoming days. With the right device intelligence, you could narrow your marketing targets down to people who are most likely to adopt an iPhone 11.

By measuring the effectiveness of a pilot campaign – say, where you target current iPhone 6 and 6s users based on adoption trend data – you can gain insights before scaling to a wider campaign that is targeted to those most likely to respond positively by converting to the iPhone 11. You reduce inventory costs and don’t waste campaign dollars promoting the iPhone 11 to audiences who don’t show an adoption trend towards that device. In an ideal scenario, you could also measure how many subscribers adopted a specific handset because they received a marketing promotion.
Product management and marketing teams will miss the right product positioning if they do not understand what drives device adoption. Converting ever-growing device connectivity data into actionable subscriber behavior insights on an ongoing basis is critical to customer-centric decisions.
Read more on Device Management Analytics:
- Service-IQ Device Management Analytics (DMA)
- Service-IQ DMA Use Cases
- Leading Mobile Operator in Vietnam Selects Guavus DMA as it Prepares for 5G
- Service-IQ DMA Product Tour
To learn more about Guavus’ Device Management Analytics approach, schedule a meeting with Guavus today.
Image attribution: iStock