A Google brand vision for mobile broadband
Far be it from me to speculate on Google’s ultimate ambitions in the wireless arena, especially regarding its bid for one or more new blocks of spectrum. What I have found, however, is a very cogent analysis of Google’s possible strategy, one that posits a Google brand vision for “mobile broadband.” This is an exciting vision because it stands to make brand history, while consigning the traditional concept of “wireless” (that of AT&T, Verizon, et. al.) to the historical dustbin.
A new platform for creating customer value
Check out this illuminating analysis on Google’s mobile broadband strategy by Harold Feld. It’s a longish post, but fascinating in detail and eminently readable. Like all brand visions, it’s about a potential new platform for creating customer value. In Feld’s analysis, Google’s vision of mobile broadband would create a whole new context of communications and mobile computing.
A brand vision that redefines the customer
I define brand vision as a company’s ability to see the future through its customer’s eyes. Accordingly, brand vision is more about the customer than it is about the company. It typically redefines the customer and the customer’s scope of freedom and action, elevating them to a new level. In other words, a brand vision is a new context of customer opportunity.
What grabbed my attention in Harold’s post was this paragraph:
OK, the biggest problem is that analysts are looking at this as if Google wanted to break into the wireless phone business and introduce the fabled “G-Phone” similar to the Apple iPhone. But that’s not what Google (and the rest of Silicon Valley) want. What Google really wants is far more audacious. Google wants to eliminate the entire wireless “phone” industry and replace it with the “mobile broadband” industry. In this world, people do not buy “mobile phone service” with the option to load all manner of various features for additional prices onto their phones. People buy a wireless service contract for a “dumb pipe” similar to what they buy (now) from cable and DSL companies.
Creating a new world is the stuff of brands
Creating a new world for customers is the stuff of brands. If Harold’s analysis is correct, Google would be changing the communications game by providing a new communications platform (mobile broadband) open to unlimited innovation and customer initiative. In many respects, it would operate just like the Net. If this is what Google is planning, it would reflect a brand agenda that’s truly disruptive.
Harold continues:
Needless to say, the existing wireless carriers — to the extent they can even contemplate such a thing — regard Google’s vision with unbridled abhorrence. But Google has one big advantage — everybody else wants the same world Google does, they just don’t know it yet. That may sound absurd, elitist, patronizing, etc. But the fact is that most people don’t realize what they want until someone with entrepreneurial vision thinks it up and sells it to them.
Extending what the iPod began
In effect, Google may be attempting to do to the communications industry what Apple did to the music industry with the iPod. It would introduce a new value equation in which the customer gains significant (real) freedom to reshape the world in his or her image. In an act of cultural liberation, customers would be freed to be proactive with mobile media, instead of being bound or hobbled or crippled by established restraints that benefit only a few.
Is there anyone (besides the incumbents) who wouldn’t want that world?
Great brands side with customers
To get customers on its side, a brand must side with customers, on the largest playing field possible. If Google’s vision for mobile broadband is close to what Feld predicts, it’s as if Google has an unstructured, subliminal understanding of what brands do.
Hat tip to David Weinberger for the link.