Wired. Here is a good example of how the research industry operates. Keynote system develops a way to test SMS delivery times. They release a report ranking the SMS participants. They then announce a service to help carriers measure SMS delivery times. There are two funny things about this article.
The first is that the reporter asks research analysts about the tactic (?). The analysts told him that Keynote shouldn’t have ranked the participants like that. What crap. Analysts do that all the time in virtually every report they write (even though most tech research is aimed at the buyers of technology, vendors generate nearly 40% of the revenue at most tech research firms). LOL!
The second funny thing is that the carriers aren’t going to buy Keynote’s monitoring service. Why? There are too few competitors (oligopoly) and their customers aren’t going to be swayed by data published by a performance measurement company in a press release. I ran into this when we were looking at a way to test cell phone reception on a per city basis. The carriers totally didn’t care about quality of service. Alan is exactly right on this:
Analysts said Keynote’s findings are nothing new. Just as the quality of voice calls over cellular networks is spotty, so is sending a text message, said Alan A. Reiter, president of Wireless Internet & Mobile Consulting.
The only way to really go after the carriers with a service like this is to:
1) Get the data published in a research report by a company with lots of buyers of technology as customers.
2) Generate an award system that the carriers can use in their advertising.
3) Spend some money on advertisements to promote the findings. Short dollars if done correctly. Do it in the cities where the companies you are targeting have their headquarters.
4) Provide data to consumer sites to let them get the word out (like DSL reports). Also, develop a splash page.
The marketing guy/gal that follows this strategy would have a $10 m business within 2 years. [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]