A More Appealing Prepaid Wireless Offering

Prepaid wireless plans have emerged as a popular option among U.S. subscribers as they’re looking to come away from the expensive and lengthy contracts that accompany some subsidized smartphones with postpaid plans. Our Mobility client was looking to identify promotional offers that would increase subscribership to prepaid monthly plans and improve acquisition across various channels where postpaid wireless plans are sold.

Our client had a large number of potential prepaid offering features that they wanted to get input on, including offers related to phone/device, service discounts, and value-add offers. We also had to account for several channel-specific offers, as our client had plans to roll out specific offers for different purchase channels (e.g., wireless retail stores, wireless websites, big-box retailers, other online retailers). We started with a Q-Sort analysis to identify the top offers that consumers would be likely to purchase. We then utilized a Discrete Choice methodology which tailored the choice activity and prepaid offerings tested to be specific to the consumer’s preferred prepaid purchase channel. This allowed us to simulate market scenarios where different prepaid offers were available through the various purchase channels.

We were able to identify the highest impact prepaid offers with the greatest preference across each of the purchase channels tested. This informed our client about which offerings they should move forward with to increase subscribership to prepaid monthly plans and improve acquisition.