GrameenPhone STAR customer program

                                     

Grameenphone started its journey with the Village Phone program: a pioneering initiative to empower rural women of Bangladesh. The name Grameenphone translates to "Rural Phone". Starting its operations on March 26, 1997, the Independence Day of Bangladesh, Grameenphone has come a long way. Grameenphone pioneered the then breakthrough initiative of mobile to mobile telephony and became the first and only operator to cover 98% of the country's people with network.

Since its inception Grameenphone has built the largest cellular network in the country with over 8500 base stations . Presently, nearly 99 percent of the country's population is within the coverage area of the Grameenphone network. Grameenphone has always been a pioneer in introducing new products and services in the local telecom market. GP was the first company to introduce GSM technology in Bangladesh when it launched its services in March 1997.

GP is the leading and most popular telecommunication brand of Bangladesh. GP has the competitive advantage in network coverage. Though it costs more than the other telecommunication brands, it is still the most popular name in the mind of the customers because of its proper customer service, continuous service improvement, offering attractive offers, best network coverage, repetitive advertisement. Recently they are using star customer offer.

STAR Program

GrameenPhone STAR program is designed to organize and appreciate its most valuable customers. A GP customer can become a GP STAR by staying with GP for a considerable duration of time with certain minimum usage. Once a customer become STAR customer, his/her status will be valid for 3 months. 

There are 4 tiers of GP STAR program: Platinum plus, platinum, gold and silver. If anyone want to be a STAR customer there are the following criteria-

Years of stay with Grameenphone	Last three months average usage (BDT) to become STAR
	Silver	Gold	Platinum	Platinum Plus
13+	N/A	N/A	501	3001
7 to 12	N/A	501	1,001
5 to 6	501	1,001	1,501
4	501	1,001	2,001
3	1,001	1,501	2,501
2	1,001	2,001	--
1	2,001	--	--
6m+ to 1yr	2,001	--	--
Less than 6m	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

 Benefit of GrameenPhone STAR:

Items	Platinum Plus	Platinum	Gold	Silver
20% Off at Retail Shop (AGORA)	✔
Privilege at BALAKA Lounge (Shahjalal Int'l Airport)	✔
Platinum Plus Banking with Eastern Bank Limited	✔
Executive Health Check-up (United/LABAID in Dhaka, Gazi Medical College, Khulna & IBN Sina Hospital, Sylhet)	✔
Invitation in Exclusive Events with Foreign Artists	✔
Surprise Gifts	✔
Complementary 5 Star Dine (The Westin & Dhaka Regency Hotel & Resort)	✔	✔
Premier Club Member (Dhaka Regency Hotel & Resort)	✔	✔
Handset (Smart Phone/New Model) Purchase in Less Price	✔	✔
Regional Events (Music/Movie/Drama/Iftar)	✔	✔	✔
Discount on Life Style Offers	✔	✔	✔	✔

Benefit of this program

1) This will help to make more long term and profitable customer relationship. 
2) This will extremely help to retain the existing customer and also increase the satisfaction level. 
3) Beside all these things it will give them a competitive advantage. 
4) It will increase the customer equity.
5) Also it will help them to make more loyal customer. 
6)With this new strategy hopefully they will grab more market share. 

GP 5 kotir network

 

GP is with their popular customer service, network coverage, special offers successfully satisfying customer needs and wants. With all these things they are garbing market share. This year their subscriber number has exceeded 5 crores. A new slogan has been used to celebrate this and that is "Choluk Onuvutir Uthsob Badahin". GP has become the brand that successfully brought one third of the total population. They are also giving special offer like GP-GP 5 poisa/10 seconds.

Referencing
Retrieved November 10,2014 from www.youtube.com. Retrieved November 10, 2014 from www.grameenphone.com. Retrieved November 10, 2014 from www.grameenphone.com/star-program. Lane keller,k. (2013), Designing and Implementing marketing program. In "Stratigic Brand Management".

 

  

   

The diminishing popularity of Xbox One

Microsoft has developed a video game console named Xbox one on may 21, 2013. It is the third console in the Xbox family. It's main competitors are Sony's Play Station 4, Nintendo's Wii U as part of the eight generation of video game consoles. Xbox One was released across North America, several European markets, Australia, and New Zealand on November 22, 2013, and later in 26 other markets, including Japan, the remaining European markets, and the Middle East, in September 2014. It is also the first Xbox game console to be released in China.

Marketing strategies of Xbox:

Robust adaptive strategy implementation:

Initial application: Microsoft's entry into the video game industry exemplifies the firm's implementation of robust adaptive strategies. They expended the business venture. They entered into the industry with it's Xbox. They took this risk because they thought that with established financial base Microsoft has plenty of room to experiment.

Creating Competitive advantages:

• Product implementation: To differentiate themselves from the competitors they came up with Xbox 360. The new system effectively doubled the bandwidth, added eight times the memory of the original Xbox, created a service Xbox live and enhanced the graphics playing power.
• System implementation: Microsoft has somewhat locked in customers. Once a customer has purchased a console, they will most likely purchase games for that specific console in order to get their money's worth.
• Sale of Xbox one: Last quarter Microsoft reported 2 million total console sales. This includes 1.2 million of Xbox One and 800,000  of Xbox 360s. This quarter Microsoft announced a grand total of 1.1 million console sales and if we take those numbers and assume 360 is stilling selling similarly then we arrive at only 300,000 Xbox One sold for the quarter ending in may which is very poor compared to their competitors. You may have heard reports that sales of the console have more than doubled but this is just a clever marketing spin to paint the Xbox One in a more favorable light. 

Reason for being failure: Though Microsoft did some big PR events for launching this brand and at the same time developed and implemented some strategies their sales of Xbox One is falling day by day. Even though they have used and improved some competitive advantages to compete the other competitors they have failed to do so. Adding insult to injury, Microsoft's competitor Sony, launched the Play Station 4 and from tweets and Facebook posts, Sony effectively accommodated disgruntled fans who felt betrayed by Microsoft decision. There are some other reasons for failing this brand. They are-

1) They failed to build proper brand resonance. Brand resonance means creating intense and active loyalty relationship with customers by highlighting how brand positioning affects what customers think, feel and do. Some initial missteps of Xbox One include lack of physical drive, the console's "always on" connectivity requirements, draconian digital right management (DRM) and a focus on live TV simply did not resonate as the company had hoped.

2) They also did not create a firm meaning of the brand. Lack of a defined vision for the Xbox One has clearly hurt its sales numbers.

3) Microsoft has been slow to approve new services in order to ensure quality.

4) Microsoft is hoping that a wide variety of video apps and windows PC apps will convince the non-gamers to buy into $449 Xbox One experience for their living room instead of a $99 Apple TV. In this case Microsoft has to prove that - what it is offering is better than just a smart TV or set-top box.

Recommendation: If they want a U-turn in their position they need to achieve the consumer trust. Through a proper communication with their consumers they will have to build the proper bilateral relation. Good news is that Xbox quickly sought to make amends by admitting its mistakes and seeking to make the appropriate changes by restating the physical drive, eliminating "always on" feature, amending DRM policies and by focusing the games and gamers. They have realized that companies do not own brands, consumers do.

References:

• http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/27/should-microsoft-sell-off-the-xbox-brand
• http://www.businessinsider.com/the-xbox-is-microsofts-strategy-for-the-tv-2014-4
• http://teamxbox.wikidot.com/marketing-strategies
• http://www.marketingtango.com/microsoft-xbox-one-integrated-marketing-admitting-wrong-can-viable-strategy