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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Globalstar Telecommunications Limited GSAT -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: limtex who wrote (5515)	7/2/1999 7:28:00 PM
From: Drew Williams	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29987

Marketing is not rocket science. Sometimes it is smoke and mirrors, but not if it is done correctly. And believe me, good marketing is the "hard stuff." Every book on sales or marketing that I have ever read lists price as about the seventh or eighth most important reason someone makes a purchase. Quality, convenience, location, special features, appropriateness to task, etc. are all more important. Thirty years ago there used to be a sign hanging in the local Baskins & Robbins ice cream emporium, which sold lots and lots of ice cream for 2-3 times what Dairy Queen got just down the street. The sign said, "Price is what you talk about when you have nothing else to sell." So I am not too excited by the pricing information Valueman has found. Yet. It depends on what else is going on. Frankly, if I were Airtouch at this point, I don't know that I would be quoting any price at all for a product and service that I cannot deliver for at least two months. A lot can change in two months. But if I were forced to do something, it would have to be in service of my long term strategy as well as something that will stick in people's memory. Remember the old joke about the man hitting the mule with a 2x4? When asked why he did that, he answered, "First, you have to get his attention." Without knowing any of the numbers, and completely off the top of my head, I might do something like this: 1) Announce a list price of $1,500.00 for the Qualcomm handset. Based on the cost of manufacturing, this is not unreasonable. There would be an activation charge of $50.00. There would be a monthly minimum charge of $40.00. Per minute costs would be on a sliding scale from $1.50 down to $1.00, depending on the quantity used per month, with the lowest price reached at 500 minutes per month. 2) Announce that the first 10,000 handsets would be sold for $499.00 with 500 free minutes per month for the first six months. Minutes over 500 would be at the normal price of $1.00. The activation charge would be waived. The monthly minimum would be waived. I don't remember seeing a price on the car kit, but it would be part of this promotion at half of whatever full price is. Blow Iridium out of the water and into Chapter 11. By stating an exhorbitant list price, we are telling people what we believe the product is worth. In this case, we are placing a high value on the product. Then we can ignore List Price and move on to sell handsets at the real (lower) price the market demands with impunity, because we can always tell people it is a promotion that will end so they gotta buy now and save. Waddadeal, waddadeal, waddadeal! Yes, Airtouch would take a bath on this. Tough. They can afford it. But, as Mqurice says, the minutes are rotting unused up there in space, and the point is to hit the ground running and get handsets out there being used. Once they are being used, people will soon begin to see how indispensable they are just like most of us are with cellular phones today. At that point, pricing ceases to be the issue. In real life, it is more important that Airtouch has good relationships with its large corporate customers. And we don't know any of that. For all we know, Airtouch may already know exactly how many handsets they can get and have customers already lined up, purchase orders in hand. That would be nice, and it could be true. If Airtouch wants a more complete marketing program from me, they will have to pay for it like everyone else. The question I would pose today is: Does anyone on this thread own Airtouch stock? Why not ask Airtouch what their marketing plans are? As a stockholder, you have a right to some information about that if not the specifics. (If I were Airtouch, I would not answer the question, but I probably would not be quoting a price on 1-800-SATPHONE either.)