Multi-brand Strategy for Telcos
What is a Multi-Brand Strategy in Telecom?
While many companies, telcos included, have always looked for upsell and cross-selling opportunities leveraging other companies’ products and services to improve the customer experience while improving margins under their core brand, a multi-brand strategy is different. It involves launching multiple distinct brands under one telecom operator to serve different market segments.
Voxi, an MVNO sub-brand that runs on Vodafone’s parent network launched to the under 30 crowd, to target Gen Z. A sim-only plan, it includes unlimited social media, video, calls, text, all under a monthly plan you can cancel at month-end. Under their “friends with benefits” perk, sign up a fiend and you both get an Amazon gift card.
Having additional brands allows offerings to be tailored to niche audiences without jeopardizing the parent brand. They can differentiate based on pricing, features, or service types. They can create a premium brand targeted to high-income customers or a no-frills one focused on cost-conscious consumers, or do both.
This multi-brand strategy gives telcos the agility to target diverse customer bases while adapting to market changes without disrupting existing operations.
Why Telecom Providers are Embracing Multi-Brand Strategies
With the explosion of MVNO cropping up everywhere, with an 8.2% projected growth rate through 2032, Increasing competition will be the new normal, as small, agile and successful MVNOs give users exactly the service they want, tailored to their specific needs. These market forces will continue to erode market share of telcos who cling to a single-brand model.
Seeing an opportunity to launch a better telco and address legacy customer onboarding issues in Malaysia, Yoodo launched a digital telco, utilizing triPica’s BSS, in just under six months. By using triPica’s agile platform and an eSIM approach, Yoodo was able to reduce onboarding time from a previous 1.5 days to under two minutes.
With increasing competition and shifting consumer expectations, telecom operators need to address different customer needs—offering various pricing models, features, and service levels, or they will find a provider that will deliver for them. A multi-brand approach allows an operator to address specific market segments with a targeted brand tailored to that audience rather than modifying a primary brand to fit a new audience.
Having multiple brands reduces reliance on a single identity, allowing for more experimentation with product offerings, pricing models, and customer engagement strategies. This freedom to experiment prevents a telco from getting stuck in a shrinking market share cycle inherent in a single-brand model, providing effective diversification of risk.
A multi-brand strategy offers the flexibility to quickly launch new services, react to competitors, and capture emerging market opportunities without disrupting the core brand. This adaptability is critical in this highly competitive telco environment.
Australian Telco Applies Cloud-native Technology
Telcos are now are shifting towards a cloud-based infrastructure which allows them to adapt to market forces quickly and tailor their offerings to deliver a targeted customer experience, whether that’s through iterating a current brand or launching a new one to a new customer niche. Telstra is an operator who is taking this approach.
Telstra, Australia’s leading telco with 22.5 million subscribers, was “one of the first mobile operators in the world to deploy cloud-native applications in a mobile core network” (in 2019).
David Aders, Group Owner for Mobile Development & Product Engineering at Telstra, shares what drove Telstra to implement a cloud-based delivery model.
“…adaptable technology and a platform that allows us to deliver innovation faster, quicker, from our product discovery and ideation, through to delivery and trialing with customers. We need a very nimble environment to do that in.”
“We see this natural evolution to cloud-native as the right direction to take advantage of what the software industry has been building up with automation capabilities and bringing that to the telco environment.”
“We approached the cloud-native as the ability to build a side bolt-on…to get early insights into how would we actually run a cloud-native network. It gave us a massive opportunity to try new ways of approaching how we run, build and life-cycle our network.”
While Telstra’s cloud-native implementation was designed as a way to transition their existing tech stack into a more nimble cloud-based system, rather than exclusively to launch additional brands, it did support those launches.
Let’s take a look at the different Telstra’s brands and how they each address varying market niches.
Belong, a digital-first, low-cost, SIM-only, post-paid mobile and internet brand popular with Gen X users, operates on a portion of Telstra’s network. It advertises in regions where it has good Telstra coverage so it can deliver an excellent service at a budget price. Some of the features of Belong’s plans include: mobile data banking (so you can roll over unused data to future months), data gifting (great for parents to share with their kids), no-lock contracts (so you can cancel at any time), and scam blocking (from parent company Telstra).
Boost Mobile A Telstra MVNO but not owned by Telstra, this is the only sub-brand that offers access to Telstra's full network, so you get excellent coverage wherever you are across Australia, award-winning low-cost, no-lock plans, data rollover, and unlimited calls/text. It targets a youth demographic with sporting event sponsorship and promotion and lifestyle marketing through social media. While Boost Mobile doesn’t fit the “multi-brand” model in that it isn’t owned by Telstra, it does address how an MVNO’s plans can pull customers from the telco’s main brand and competing sub-brands.
ALDI Mobile While not a direct sub-brand, it operates on the Telstra Wholesale network (75% of the Telstra parent network) and offers competitive pricing for prepaid plans with features like data rollover. It is popular with an older demographic that values straightforward no-frills plans at a low price.
Everyday Mobile Partnered with Woolworths, this service also uses Telstra’s wholesale network and provides discounts on grocery shopping for customers, appealing to budget-conscious families. It comes in prepaid and post-paid, and SIM and eSIM options.
Pennytel Another reseller using the Telstra Wholesale network, offering SIM-only, post-paid, low-cost plans designed for simplicity and reliability. Targeted to seniors, it has a call center with extended hours that can be a benefit for those who want more personalized contact.
The IT Challenges of Launching and Managing Multiple Telecom Brands
Launching and managing multiple brands requires a sophisticated IT infrastructure, able to handle varying product catalogs, pricing models, customer journeys, and marketing campaigns for each brand without excessive complexity.
Traditional IT systems are often siloed and inflexible, making it difficult to quickly spin up new brands or adjust existing ones. This can lead to inefficiencies, high costs, and delayed time-to-market.
What IT Platform is Needed for a Successful Multi-Brand Strategy?
To successfully implement a multi-brand strategy, telecom operators require a flexible, cloud-native BSS (Business Support System) that can support multiple brands within the same platform, rather than try to modify their core infrastructure – often resulting in an expensive, time-consuming exercise that delivers underwhelming results. An ideal platform would include:
Unified Customer Data Management: A centralized view of customer data across all brands, ensuring a seamless experience no matter which brand the customer engages with.
Agile Product and Pricing Management: The ability to quickly configure different product catalogs, pricing tiers, and promotions for each brand without complicated custom development.
Seamless Billing and Subscription Management: A flexible billing system that can support different pricing models—prepaid, postpaid, subscription, or hybrid—for multiple brands.
Scalability and Speed to Market: A cloud-native platform enables telecoms to rapidly launch new brands and scale without the need for expensive, complex infrastructure.
How a Cloud-Native BSS Platform Like triPica Supports Multi-Brand Launches
Once you’ve decided to launch a secondary brand, and have determined a cloud-native BSS rather than an inhouse solution is desired, triPica’s BSS rises to the top for your consideration.
triPica’s quick-to-deploy cloud-native BSS allows for the rapid creation of new brands and services, reducing time to market. Telco providers can introduce new brands within months instead of years.
Its modular architecture delivers the flexibility needed to experiment with new brands, services, and pricing models without overhauling your entire system. Each brand can have its own identity while being supported by a single unified backend. No need to build each brand from the ground up.
A centralized platform ensures that customer data is synchronized across brands, allowing for a consistent, high-quality and seamless customer experience.
With a platform that allows for dynamic product offerings, you can quickly adjust pricing, promotions, and product bundles for each brand, keeping your offerings fresh and competitive across diverse markets.
By eliminating the need to build separate IT stacks for each brand, a cloud-based BSS significantly reduces the cost and complexity of managing multi-brand operations.
Click here to learn more about how triPica can help you launch your next telco brand.
