DoCoMo - The Japanese Wireless Telecom Leader

I-Mode: DoCoMo's Success Story Contd...

This was because the company wanted to keep its services simple and did not want to create any unrealistic expectations among the customers. The other reason for such a carefully subtle promotional exercise was to differentiate the service from the Web and WAP services available across the world. I-mode was positioned as a simple, usable and fun-to-use service. The biggest advantage of I-Mode, according to analysts, was that the service acted as a Win-Win-Win platform, benefiting DoCoMo, content providers and customers.

While DoCoMo collected information charges from customers (for the content acquired by the customers from various sites) on behalf of the content providers and charged a commission of 9% on the amount, it passed the rest to the content providers.

The content providers could thus receive their share without indulging in the hassles of billing and collection, which left them free to concentrate on developing content. The customers also benefited on account of the wide variety of content accessible through the service at economical prices. Being an open platform, I-Mode allowed all and sundry to set up a site on its network, thus increasing the variety of content available.

Analysts remarked that DoCoMo succeeded because it chose not to be a gatekeeper between content companies and their customer base. The company also had made it easy for individual Web developers to make their sites I-Mode friendly. And when DoCoMo realized that it could attract more customers, if it offered more websites on I-Mode, it increased the number of accessible sites to more than 20,000 by early 2001. Also, the customer abandonment rate (number of customers shifting to other mobile service) reduced drastically.

On account of such strategies, DoCoMo reached far ahead of other players in the wireless telecom market across the world thus forcing other players to focus on the wireless web services as well. DoCoMo's constant focus on identifying the changing needs of customers and providing for them well in advance than its competitors helped it in positioning itself as the market leader. Reportedly, its major competitors KDDI and J-Phone were left far behind on account of I-Mode.

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Case Details

Case Code : BSTR049
Themes: Differentiation
Case Length : 17 Pages
Period : 1992 - 2003
Organization : NTT DoCoMo (DoCoMo) Inc
Pub Date : 2003
Teaching Note : Available
Countries : Japan
Industry : Telecommunication

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