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Shaken & Stirred - Influential Brand Profiling and Positioning

Want to launch your own branded network service and make recurring revenues without much effort?

Branded Community Phones the Next Tupperware?

By Mark Trowbridge, CEO, RIPTec


If you think that Tupperware parties went out with the 1980s, think again. They’re alive and well, but now have a new face in the form of brands creating communities and upselling all things own-branded into it.

Social media is fuelling the rise of branded communities as is the growing trend towards lifestyle segmentation where like-minded people come together in communities.  So, if you want to launch your own branded network service and make recurring revenues without much effort, just click here (http://riptec.net/community.php).

So, instead of selling Tupperware products into communities 1980s-style, the best modern day equivalent for a brand to make more money could well be offering an own-label branded mobile service to them with all the benefits of low cost calling and Instant Messaging.

It ticks all the boxes. Enhances my brand? Tick. Makes me money? Tick. No effort? Tick. No support? Tick. All you need do is feed the community with products like this. Your brand becomes digital Tupperware.

There’s a little bit of Tupperware thinking in the offering of a start up called RIPTec. It’s offer is being hyped as the world’s easiest smartphone service for brands to make money from their communities. It’s a vanilla product, or more precisely a network service and app called RIPDialer, that brands can customise with their logo and identity colours and offer their communities a lifestyle optimized mobile service with worldwide coverage and the possibility to rent virtual phone numbers in 62 countries.

The end-user pricing model couldn’t be simpler: pay a fixed monthly fee for a phone number and unlimited domestic calls, fixed and mobile, are included in the price. In the UK for example the first phone number costs £9.95 per month and all subsequent numbers £2.95.

International calls are charged per minute according to the very affordable rates provided by RIPTec. The branded service provider then earns a share of the total revenue generated by the community members.

Every time someone in your community signs up for your branded service and communicates using your service or rents phone numbers, they use your brand and make you money.

So, what sets this communications app apart from the pack? For the first time, every member of your community can segment their mobile lifestyle. The RIPDialer app has a unique way to combine mobile and Internet communication services with multiple phone numbers so that it perfectly adapts to the communication needs of any lifestyle. Often communities unite in a homogeneous segment of people with a specific lifestyle that the mainstream one-size-for-all mobile services fail to address.

As example, if a user’s lifestyle involves travelling and moving from one country to another, RIPDialer provides affordable rates worldwide, free internet calls and local numbers in 62 countries for extra convenience.

For an entrepreneurial lifestyle, RIPDialer puts all the business numbers into the same smartphone, allows making and receiving calls on any of them on a call-to-call basis, and even splits private and business bills to make managing businesses easier.

Users with multiple numbers – home, summerhouse, overseas home, office – easily port all their existing numbers into the RIPDialer app and eventually handle all the communication on those numbers on the one smartphone. This makes organizing their busy lives easier, and saves costs. Gone are the days when you pay a monthly rental for a landline.

When you travel, you add a local virtual number so any calls you make locally on the ski slopes are at local call rates. Same for football fans when travelling to a Europa League match – they add a local number when in France to call locally.

“Brand communities are popping up all over the world … football clubs, online dating, retailers … and they need feeding,” says Mark Trowbridge, RIPTec’s CEO.  “Brands now have the opportunity to offer their communities their own network service and profit from it every minute of the day.”

RIPTec’s revenue share business model makes it a risk-free opportunity for brands and communities. As the network, RIPTec’s technical operation team and the vanilla app are already in place, setup is fast and needs no technical investments from the brand. The service bearing the customer’s brand and identity can be launched in just a few days.

The licensee earns its share of revenue directly from end-users’ spending on rented virtual numbers and international calls.

The revenue opportunity becomes quickly lucrative as the number of members grows. One with 10,000 members with an average monthly spend of £9.95 generates the branded service provider almost £200,000 as annual incomes from the revenue share, and 30,000 members crosses the £500,000 income milestone. The larger the customer base and higher the consumption, the more profitable the service becomes for the brand.

So, if you want to launch your own branded network service and make recurring revenues without much effort, just click here (http://riptec.net/community.php).