Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Make up your mind

Is Theresa Gattung's forthcoming biography called Second Act as per the blurb, or is it Bird on a Wire as per the cover and the bits of media about it?

Some of us will be reading with interest, especially the bits about how "the company struggled with the Australian AAPT acquisition." Why do I think that this is not going to align with my view of the strategic errors that were made, most notably the dumb decision from day one of a "trans-Tasman" internet and mobile business, during which time AAPT lost so much of its momentum.

One NZ commentator has listed the 10 questions he'd like answered by the book. Unfortunately it is behind a paywall. I can reveal though that he provides this link to an address where TG said;

Think about pricing. What has every telco in the world done in the past? It's used confusion as its chief marketing tool. nd that's fine, you could argue that that's helped all of us keep calling prices up and get those revenues - high margin businesses - keep them for going a lot longer than would otherwise have been the case. But at some level whether they conciously [unclear] figured it out or not, customers know that's what the game had been, they know that we've not been straight up.

In fairness I think TG was at this point trying to make the case for being a Straight Up telco, in line with AAPT rebranding. But it wasn't the best way of doing it. It's like the person who in the middle of a long discussion prefaces an answer "let me tell you the truth". Huh? You mean eveything up till now hasn't been? You can't announce you are now going to be truthful.

He also muses about whether she will engage with the question of "whether interviewers concentrate on how Gattung talks because so much of what she says is dull."

The last comment belongs to a friend who I think would prefer to be anonymous;

I wonder if she’ll spend a few chapters dissecting her evolving “style” (yes, I use that term loosely) and her fight to maintain integrity in her identity by wearing obscene amounts of pinks and florals?

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