How US Telcos Can Build Targeted Sub-Brands for Super Segments

Executive Summary: How Super Segmentation Can Help Telcos Build Greater Customer Retention

As US telcos double down on price guarantees and defensive bundles, they risk falling into a cycle of sameness. In a mature market like the US where acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining them, broad-based offerings which can eventually become commoditized may not be enough for long-term customer retention.

Digital Mobile Operator (DMO) sub-brands aimed at rapidly learning about and catering to profitable digital native customer segments offer a compelling new path forward. Sub-brands built for this purpose are called ‘speedboat DMOs’ that can help to chart the course for the ‘supertanker’ flagship telco brand.

Flagship brands are a lot like supertankers. They carry a lot of value but cannot change their direction as quickly, making them unsuitable to bear the risks of rapid experimentation. That’s where smaller, more agile speedboat brands that are built for experimentation can come in.

As strategic sensors, speedboat DMO brands let telcos test bold offers without impacting the flagship brand. They help uncover high-value super segments, trial new narratives and products, and deepen brand affinity with niche audiences. Just as importantly, they build the organizational agility needed for faster iteration and richer customer insight, benefitting the telco organization as a whole.

This article outlines the branding and software foundations US telcos need to rapidly launch experimental digital sub-brands: precise brand positioning from market research, data-driven personalization, and agile software for testing and launching offers.

These branding foundations are part of Circles’ playbook for uncovering and monetizing high-growth segments around the world to launch high-performing digital brands with proven impact on average revenue per user (ARPU), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and app engagement. 

For US telcos ready to evolve beyond the bundle, here is a blueprint for rapid, resilient growth.

The Battle for Attention and Loyalty - Going Beyond Bundles

In today’s hypercompetitive telecom landscape, US carriers are leaning on longer price freezes and bundling strategies to hold onto subscribers. These moves are designed to deliver predictability, reduce churn, and defend market share in a saturated market where the number of mobile subscriptions exceeds the population.

However, these bundles could still potentially become commoditized as every provider will eventually offer the same selection of services and value. With little offer differentiation, customer retention will still remain a challenge. 

This is where specialized lifestyle telco sub-brands can come in. By creating engaging speedboat DMO brands that can uncover and then serve profitable super segments of digital natives, building brand loyalty the likes of KDDI’s DMO sub-brand povo is within reach.

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The Case for Building New Sub-Brands: How Sub-Brands Surface Value

While the US market currently has many Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs), there is a solid case for building more of them as speedboat DMOs.

Digital sub-brands have a proven track record of supporting their parent telcos in terms of customer acquisition. In some cases, digital sub-brands can acquire customers at half the cost and reduce the cost to serve by 50 - 70%. In some markets, digital telco sub-brands can contribute up to 25% of new subscriber additions within the first year of launch.¹

MVNOs like AT&T’s Cricket Wireless, T-Mobile’s Mint Mobile, and Verizon’s Visible are already being used to defend telco market share and cater to specific niches. But with the right support, more of MVNOs’ brand loyalty potential can be unlocked.

Well-designed MVNOs, also known as Digital Mobile Operators (DMOs), can act as strategic sensors for both learning and selling. These speedboat brands can rapidly surface unmet needs, fine-tune value propositions, and build brand equity with niche segments like:

These niches contain profitable subsegments such as:

In today’s market where multi-SIM smartphones are increasingly common, giving these segments a brand that aligns with their identities and lifestyles greatly contributes to loyalty and engagement. 

And in a saturated market where the cost of acquiring a new customer is up to 25x higher than retaining one,⁸ finding profitable niches to engage and retain through tailored experiences is valuable.

That’s where rapidly launching speedboat DMO brands to learn about and serve these new niches comes in. When pursuing this strategy, US telcos will benefit greatly from software and partners that enable the following:

This super-segment strategy is already providing positive results in terms of ARPU, NPS, and app engagement around the world, in Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East.

The next section covers some of the branding support needed to help telcos build super-segment winning experiences.

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From Mass to Micro: Why Brand Precision Matters

Successful brands like Apple are built on creating experiences and offers that resonate with their target audience. These experiences are built on a deep and continuously evolving understanding of a brand’s target audience, which is why brand precision is key.

For US telcos looking to grow ARPU without eroding their core market share, brand precision and personalization will be key to standing out among their newly uncovered target super segments. Uncovering these segments requires operators to go deeper: uncovering distinct motivations, behaviours, usage patterns, and more.

With digital natives expected to represent a larger share of the workforce, Circles has found success for its clients by uncovering and catering to a profitable sub-segment of digital natives called Digital Pioneers. Here is a summary of four high-value Digital Pioneer mindsets that were uncovered:

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Sages: Community-minded educators who value mentorship and content creation platforms

Creative Expressionists: Social-first storytellers who use mobile as a medium of identity

Efficient Executors: Hyper-optimized taskmasters who prioritize control, automation, and simplicity

Diversion Seekers: Passionate gamers and streamers looking for immersive entertainment bundles

While these personas were uncovered in other countries, similarly profitable super segments could be waiting to be discovered in the US. You can read more about these mindsets in our articles about Sages & Creative Expressionists and Diversion Seekers and Efficient Executors.

Uncovering and serving these super segments needs the right branding and software support pillars:

Branding Support Pillar 1: An Engaging Brand Powered by Well-researched Personas

High-NPS DMO brands begin with deep human insights. Engaging brands resonate with their customers’ hopes, pains, and frustrations. Circles’ sub-brand creation service integrates market research, influencer strategy, app interface customization, and local cultural nuance into brand building. 

For example, in one Middle Eastern market, younger digital natives identified themselves with “freedom.” They didn’t want to be held back by contracts or feel controlled by telcos and preferred having a sense of digital autonomy and control over their costs that prepaid plans give them.

The new brand was built around this theme of freedom while coupling it with local influencer campaigns, which earned the following results:

On top of the influencer partnerships, a culturally resonant creative campaign around cricket was shown in the country’s Time’s Square. The Time’s Square campaign won widespread visibility:

Initial research is enough to get the brand started, but brand messaging and offers need to be tested and adapted as users evolve. That’s where customer value management and the software that supports it comes in.

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Pillar 2: Personalization at Scale With Real-time Data

The best techcos engage customers at various key points through analytics and personalized experiences, and the same holds true for telcos. This personalization approach can increase revenues by around 10 percent and increase customer satisfaction and engagement between 20 to 30 percent.⁹

This level of personalization can be achieved by working with a partner who not only uncovers deep insights through branding and market research but also has a tech-stack that enables 360° customer insights for ongoing campaign optimization.

Pre-integrated full-stack software that integrates BSS, OSS, and Martech together helps speedboat DMO brands collect deeper and richer customer data to develop subsegments, personalized offers, upsell messages, and churn retention initiatives. 

On the data tracking front, Circles supplements in-app behavioral data with DNS-level browsing intelligence, enabling more nuanced personalization. 

Sourcing data from multiple platforms gives telcos rich insights into user interests, social behavior, and app interaction habits. This can drill down to which times of the day they are most active and which communication channels they frequently use.

These insights power personalized marketing messages and even unlock new advertising and partnership revenue streams. Personalized marketing campaigns can be launched at the right time and channel, turning individual purchases into recurring revenue. Further, any eKYC can be layered to optimize prediction accuracy further.

This cross-channel data enrichment allows operators to go beyond demographics and craft micro-targeted experiences that reflect real user behavior across platforms. In the markets that Circles manages, this approach produced the following results:

One example of how this 360° insights can be used to convert high-intent leads is through Circles’ three-stage retargeting system built around real-time CRM triggers and purchase signals. 

Detailed user data such as their service preferences, habits, interests, and the times they are active online are all used when generating users’ personalized customer journeys and product recommendations. 

These retargeting campaigns are then launched via appropriate channels depending on the phase of the customer journey the customers are at. Channels like live chat are used if they are the pre-abandonment stage or are displaying abandonment intent. For those who have abandoned their carts, retargeting campaigns will be shown via social media, email, and push notifications to encourage them to recover their carts.

This approach has been tested across different speedboat DMO brands across multiple markets and delivers performance above industry benchmarks: a 79% increase in conversion rate, 45% email open rates versus a 21% industry average, and 7% click-through versus a 2% baseline. 

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Pillar 3: Operational Agility to Rapidly Test and Learn from Rapid Product and Campaign Launches

To keep pace with customers’ changing expectations, telcos need to rethink how they design, test, and scale offerings. For speedboat DMO brands to succeed, these brands need to be as dynamic as their customers, supported by their ability to act on real-time insights and experiment rapidly.

Digital platforms that provide both real-time customer insights and enable efficient testing and launch of new campaigns and products are key.

In one example of a trial, Circles launched a campaign in partnership with Singapore’s Golden Village cinemas to assess the contribution of bundled cinema tickets to perceived customer value. The results were positive: there were 400 uptakes within the first week with positive customer feedback mentioning that they could book movie tickets and trips while earning points on rewards.

At the core of this capability is a purpose-built Test and Learn approach which lets telcos deploy, measure, and refine customer journeys across the whole purchase cycle. The results of these experiments can then power new products and personalized offers in real time, enabling faster product-market fit.

These need to be supported by a platform that can rapidly onboard and launch third-party non-connectivity services like entertainment, shopping, insurance, or even ride-hailing. OpenAPI powered platforms will enable telcos to launch and test various bundle combinations based on the real-time feedback that their market provides. 

To help DMO brands stay ahead of the game, Circles’ digital platform enables operators to trial non-core value propositions such as streaming entertainment, travel benefits including travel insurance, or even generative AI subscriptions with minimal lead time. 

In an industry where most digital transformation projects fail to scale impact, the ability to test, learn, and optimize continuously is now a matter of survival for today’s telcos. 

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Conclusion: Test Boldly. Scale Wisely. Grow Confidently.

In the US telecom market, convergence and commoditization pose major threats to customer retention. As price guarantees and bundled offers become indistinguishable, operators have a new option to consider: building engaging brands tailored to specific, newly uncovered, high-value customer segments.

Speedboat DMOs offer the operational and strategic flexibility to execute this plan. Operators can identify and engage profitable super segments, explore alternative brand narratives and pricing models, and de-risk innovation through isolated test environments. Critically, they can build organizational muscle for faster iteration and deeper customer insight.

This strategy’s success will be driven by dynamic customer engagement and a deep understanding of your customers. The ability to test and optimize offers, app experiences, and personalized messages across segments and channels is crucial. Platforms must support full-stack experimentation and data collection powered by real-time churn prediction, behavioral analytics, and multi-stage customer value management.

Circles brings a tried-and-tested approach to these challenges. As both operator and technology provider, we have helped launch digital mobile operators across Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Our platform includes:

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In an industry where seven out of ten digital transformations fail to generate sustained impact, Circles provides a practical model for success. On top of our software, our experience managing global telco brands delivers a pathway for operators to modernize, differentiate, and grow.

For telcos seeking to create speedboat digital brands that resonate with tomorrow’s high-LTV segments, the time to act is now. Circles can help you move with speed, precision, and confidence.