Case Study: Optimising Product Strategy

The Brief

A well-known European mobile operator asked us to review their mobile music products. The client primarily wanted us to identify actions that would boost music download revenues in the short term but we were also asked to propose improvements to the client's roadmap in order to develop the music category to the fullest extent possible.

What We Did

This project involved a range of techniques:

• We first set up a 5-week, 50-person User Experience Laboratory (UEL) which allowed us to clearly understand not only how consumers used the client's mobile music service but also how the client's service compared with the offerings of rival operators. Participants in the UEL were carefully selected to be representative of the users that were being targeted with the service; ;
• Our next step was to carry out a feature prioritisation exercise where we used the results of the UEL to identify the features that proved most popular with the users, based on their experiences with the full range of competing products;
• By carrying out detailed one-on-one interviews with all the UEL participants we were able to understand how the client's own customers perceived the client's mobile music service and mobile music in general;
• We then carried out a detailed review of how the client was promoting the service so we could assess whether the marketing campaign was being aimed at the right users - mainly people that had phones that were compatible with the service;
• Finally, we carried out an analysis to assess whether the product and the promotional program were consistent with the client's revenue targets.

Results

We were able to suggest precise modifications to the clients feature roadmap: quite a few speculative features were dropped in favour of features which had proved popular in the UEL, some of which were offered by competitors. Our analysis of the client's marketing program together with our understanding of the target consumer segment allowed us to recommend improvements which were based on the use of new, tageted media channels.

The understanding gleaned from interviewing the UEL participants together with our own understanding of fundamental trends in the market allowed us to recommend that the client develop a phased, multi-platform music strategy - one that spanned mobile, PC, radio and TV.

At the time, this suggestion was seen as a quite radical but, today, dual download services are widely accepted and triple and quad-download services are in development.