Telecom Case Histories: Simulate Mistakes, Introduce Winners

Three years ago, we faced five challenges: a new brand, new technology, new products, new markets, and new competitors. There was an opportunity to re-make the business and many decision options, with an urgent need to be "right the first time". Issues included:

How to define a marketing strategy
How to direct product development
How to assess competitive threats

We opted for a comprehensive model of choice covering multiple geographic areas that collected data from 6000 current and prospective customers. The model used was SUMM®, a proprietary technique of Eric Marder Associates.

SUMM® was chosen because of its ability to integrate perceptions with importance measures to predict respondent choice, its capacity to represent detail, and its enhanced simulation capability.

SUMM® is appropriate for situations in which a large number of open-ended issues (such as the following) must be evaluated:

What should our basic strategy be?
How should we respond to an as-yet-unidentified competitor?
Which configuration of hundreds of detailed features will have the best potential?
Which marketing or technical alternatives are worth working on?

Numerous validation experiences have lent credibility to the process. We have integrated SUMM® modeling methodology into our customer satisfaction tracking process.

Instead of traditional satisfaction, we focus our attention on the "chooser share" among current customers: a concrete probability of repurchase rate that allows "apples-to-apples" evaluation of strategies designed to improve customer satisfaction.