KUALA LUMPUR: Mobile Internet in Malaysia is set to surge with more than half a million regular users currently, and more subscribers setting their sights on this ‘musthave’ technology feature for their next mobile phone, a new Mobile Insights Report from leading international market research firm, The Nielsen Company has revealed.
“Generally it is males who tend to score higher on wanting emerging technology features in their handsets, but when it comes to mobile Internet, both genders are equal. This shows that this emerging technology is fast gaining mainstream acceptance,” according to Vinod Paul, Consumer Research Director of The Nielsen Company, Malaysia who oversaw the survey. The findings emerged from Nielsen’s Malaysia Mobile Insights Report, the largest syndicated survey of its kind conducted on the Malaysia Telecommunications (Telco) market covering over 3,000 subscribers in Peninsula and East Malaysia. The survey measures the mobile landscape in terms of brand performance, reported market share, purchasing habits, reported usage and preference as well as satisfaction and loyalty for Telco operators and handset devices among Malaysian citizens, expats and migrant workers.
Another interesting insight that surfaced is the apparent disconnect between Malaysian Telco operators’ brand equity among customers and their actual market share, through an analysis of the Telco’s’ Brand Equity Indices (BEI), Nielsen’s leading management tool for measuring brand equity performance. (Chart 1) “The Nielsen BEI barometer gives Telcos a reality check. It is a very useful and powerful tool for operators, allowing them to benchmark their actual market shares against consumers’ perceptions and satisfaction levels and help identify existing gaps and implement effective marketing and operational strategies to align both aspects,” said Mr Paul (Nielsen’s BEI is calculated based on preference, recommendation of a brand and willingness to pay more for a brand).
According to the report, Maxis’ strong BEI share is reflected in its current dominance of the market, while Celcom is a key challenger, ranking the second most preferred brand. (Chart 2) “Celcom appears to be underleveragingits brand strength with consumers considering that the company currently outperforms Maxis on major network considerations such as network quality, coverage and pricing. It would also indicate that Maxis’ current market share over indexes on its present brand equity,” commented Paul. Digi, the third most preferred service network, appears to be slightly underleveraging its brand equity with consumers, but to a lesser degree than Celcom.
“We expect the launch of mobile number portability (MNP) to have a limited impact on subscribers in a mature market like Malaysia where any who are really unhappy with their service provider would have gradually moved to other networks even before now. However, it does mean that telcos cannot afford to rest on their laurels as their service levels will be placed under intense scrutiny. We foresee that telcos will have to step up their investments in customer relationship management (CRM) efforts as they face increasing competitive pressure in a level playing field to defend their market share, commented Paul.
The survey also shed light on the psychographic profile of users across key mobile phone brands. “Samsung’s profile skews towards users 35 years and above and is concentrated on Chinese. Nokia owners are more mass marketand tend to be prepaid users. Motorola users tend to be experimental, hence can be easily swayed. Meanwhile, Sony Ericsson lays claim to a very attractive profile of young and high spending postpaid users,” said Paul.
No comments:
Post a Comment