Developing lifelong customers in the mobile phone market: A South African case study

This paper argues that, to survive in increasingly competitive mobile phone markets, mobile phone service providers should develop marketing strategies that not only address immediate marketing needs of short-term profitability, but also emphasise developing lifelong customers. Although this approach might negatively affect short-term profits, these, however, can be compensated in the long-run. In this paper, we posit that long-run marketing success is a function of how a service provider attracts and maintains customers over sustained periods. A sample of South African Generation Y mobile phone subscribers was studied with a view to identifying factors leading to lifelong patronage to a service provider. Contrary to past findings that suggest subscribers migrate permanently from one operator to a competitor, this study provides two new insights. Firstly, although subscriber migration across mobile networks was observed, it is not as widespread as earlier thought; and more importantly it is not permanent. Movement across networks on the part of subscribers is a strategy to enhance their satisfaction by complementing services from different operators. The findings of the paper mostly apply to African and other emerging markets.