As much as I’d like to ramble about how evil Virgin are and how much they want to suck out your money, I wont, because some good people are already doing that. Instead, I wanted to talk about a very clever and deceptive marketing trick they’ve employed in India in recent times - yes I’m talking about the “Get Paid for Incoming” scheme, so yeah, I am rambling about how evil they are!
So, the deal is that you get paid Rs. 0.10 for every minute of incoming calls. For a crude analysis, lets assume the average cost of an outgoing call is Re. 1 per minute (local), and averaging that with STD, which is around Rs. 2.40 a minute on Virgin and something similar on other operator, so doing another rough weighted average, lets assume that the average cost of a call in India is about Rs. 1.50 per minute.
It all boils down to this, for every Rs. 1.50 somebody spends, a Virgin customer gets Rs. 0.10. That, not considering VAS and other factors, looks like this:
That’s about the 6% market share Virgin needs to break even based on just calls alone. Now, there are…
Other reasons why Virgin thinks they’ll screw the customers
- They’re targeting the youth segment, and that is one segment which does a lot of texting, so that’s basically free money for Virgin.
- Virgin is pretending to be VAS rich, again free money (for the most part).
- What am I forgetting? Oh yeah, remember all the fees required to keep your connection alive and working. There was so much terminology (top-up, refill, recharge, validity extension, bla. bla.) that I got fed up and got a postpaid. That’s how they mint money.
Based on the above, that 6% might as well drop to well below even 1% if they get the customers they want, and if there’s anything Richard Branson does well, its getting a “certain kind” of customer.
And finally… How to screw Virgin Back
Give up and go back to the days of good old post, it cannot be done. But seriously, do exactly what they show in the ads, you earn, but somebody’s money is most probably going to Virgin.
Oh wait, not to mention losing all of your pride. Wait again, if you’re doing this, you probably never had any.