The folks at 3mobilebuzz recently sent me a new mobile internet dongle to play with, and I have to say that I have been very impressed!
The dongle is very simple to install – just whizz it out its box, plug it in and within minutes you’ll be online. I travel a lot around the UK for work and it was a pleasure being able to send emails during my London-Manchester train journey. I did get disconnected at times, but overall I was quite impressed with the signal strength.
I think there is a massive opportunity to market this product to Londoners. If you pick up a free London paper on your way to/back from work, you would probably have noticed quite a few ‘3’ ads for the dongle.
As a flat sharer, moving into a flat without an Internet connection can be nightmare and being tied to a 12 months contract for both a landline and broadband is both expensive and daunting if you’re not sure how long you are going to stay in that flat.
Why not advertise the dongle as a cheaper alternative to landlines and broadband and the bonus of being able to move out without having to worry about where your broadband/landline is registered? I am sure this would appeal to quite a few consumers emotionally. Fair enough, it’s not as fast a home internet connection but it certainly does the job for emailing and browsing the Internet…
My only criticism would be that 3 introduced too many different formats of dongles too quickly. My flatmate bought a ‘matchbox’ modem last year and wanted to have my dongle as she saw it – like a lot of customers, even though both dongles do the exact same thing, she wanted the latest one out! I think that offering different colours is a great idea – there seems to be a trend for pinks as far as mobile phones are concerned – why not dongles? At least they’ll certainly stand out from the competition!
3 currently have the cheapest tariffs out there and will even offer you a discount if you are already have a mobile phone contract with them. I think that ‘3’ could try to kill two birds with one stone by using their dongle offer to get consumers to switch mobile network… ‘3’ could also talk more to the very large Aussie community in London to sign up as ‘3’ is also available in Oz – and I am sure no one would say no to free calls back home with a Skype Phone!
Filed under: Outreaching to bloggers, Seeding programmes, Viral, Viral Marketing | Tagged: 3, 3 dongle, mobile broadband
love that name: “dongle”
who gets to come up with this?? Is there a guy sitting in an office somewhere with a big grin on his face going, ‘dongle… yep, that was me.’
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dongle
LOL -LOL - LOL (sorry 3!). Yup, I can’t say I am a big fan of the name either - I much prefer USB stick!
Very interesting!
I haven’t seen dongles in Canada… but we do have “wireless cards” that are essentially PCMCIA cards that fit nicely in my laptop.
It really comes in handy when you are at firewalled client sites making presentations and you need internet access as part of the show.
We pay about $75 CDN / month for unlimited data. I think that’s about 30 pounds.
Hi Phil,
Looks like we are more acvanced in Canada than you are. We’ve had modems and now the dongles - both do the smae thing but in a slightly different format. All mobile networks have one in their portfolio so we are spoilt for choice. Perhaps too much choice!