Marketing remains the key to Vodafone's continued growth

By David Long

Friday 17th November 2000

PROMOTED: Grahame Maher

New Vodafone managing director Grahame Maher is looking forward to the opportunity to take the company, which has seen its market share rise from 20% to 37%, even further.

Mr Maher has been promoted from sales, marketing and operations manager to replace John Rohan who is vacating the top position to become director of Pacific operations.

From the time Vodafone bought BellSouth it has strived, and sometimes struggled, to position itself as a very different mobile phone company from Telecom. Marketing has been crucial as it built its brand around fun and exciting advertising campaigns to appeal to the youth market.

"We're perceived well in the youth market and we're doing more and more in the business market where we're developing new solutions for things like high-speed data transmission and other business applications," Mr Maher said.

Vodafone is one of the country's biggest advertising spenders - $17.9 million last year - but Mr Maher believes that budget may drop in the future. "A lot of that is dependent on the competitive environment - we spend a reasonable amount on advertising and Telecom spends more ... As our customer base gets larger, more of our communication will be directed straight to [customers]."

Mr Maher has been in the mobile industry for eight years. He used to own a Vodafone service provider in Australia, then became involved in running a couple of the large service providers for Vodafone before coming across to New Zealand with Mr Rohan when Vodafone was looking for some acquisitions in the Pacific. He has been here for two years and regards the change of name as the most successful campaign he has been involved in.

The mobile phone market is still rapidly expanding. The current penetration of mobiles is about 40%, up from 17% when Vodafone bought BellSouth two years ago.

"We're still growing rapidly and will go past 100%, the reason being that that there are now applications that use a phone. Already we're seeing a fashion trend where people upgrade their phone regularly - that's happening in an 18-month time frame."

The biggest advantage Vodafone has had over Telecom has been the growth of text messaging, rising from a mere 5000 a month when Vodafone acquired BellSouth to a million messages a day.

Every Vodafone phone has the ability to send and receive text messages but only certain Telecom mobile phones have that capability.

Sitting next to Mr Maher during this interview is Chris Taylor, who has just joined the company from Tip Top where he was marketing manager. He will take over the head of marketing position at Vodafone. For the position, Vodafone intentionally went for someone from a non-telecommunications background, in keeping with a trend for cellphones to be increasingly marketed as an FMCG (fast moving consumer good).

Sport has always played a big part in Vodafone's marketing. It is the main sponsor of three NPC rugby teams as well as the Football Kingz and the troubled Warriors rugby league team. The change of ownership of the Warriors gave Vodafone the option to escape its contract with the continual underachievers but Mr Maher said that Vodafone was committed in its support of the NRL franchise.

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