Sunday, September 17, 2006

Celtel

As is widely known, the Dutch-based telco Celtel has now taken over and rebranded V-Mobile. Any expectations that they might up the ante in quality of experience are yet to be proven, especially given their initial marketing effort. The whole-page ads in todays papers have an image of a girl in a hat smiling, holding her head in her hands. The strapline is "Exceed. Expectations." To the right is the Celtel logo, with the brand strapline, "Making life better." I find such diabolically crap standards of advertising a personal insult. The copywriter should be defenestrated, the "art director" slowly garotted.

So, if this is all they can do with the brand, let's not expect too much from the actual service. Nigeria is just too damn easy for telcos: when you can make so much money offering ninth-rate shit, why bother offering quality? Rent-seekers all, peddling monosodium glutamate to the masses..

5 comments:

Akin 1:54 pm  

Defenestration, now that is a decent way of disposing of rivals, out of the window, a loud cry, a big thud and a splash of red in the street.

The culprit looks out momentarily to ensure no anti-gravitational forces are thwarting the act.

It becomes inexplicable crime-scene where clues would be gold dust except if you can read the dead person's memory.

As for the advert, they were probably doing high-fives for that large stroke of ignominy - it is the "enlightened" world we live in today.

If advertisers had people like me for their audience, just as you have noted, we would all be far from impressed - there has to be better ways to find out if a product is what it claims to be.

Chxta 2:14 pm  

Thank you for this outlet Jeremy. Working with V-Mobile on a project when I was back home made me lose a lot of hope in that company. The commitment (or lack of) of their staff is less than pathetic. If we couldn't get ssomething as simple as a LAN properly running between Lagos-Abuja-Kaduna-Kano, then you have to wonder how their entire network is. By the way just in case you want to know, it took us over a week to get the microwave link between Lagos and Port Harcourt up and running because their people were not interested.

MTN is worse.

My Talking Beginnings 4:44 pm  

I agree with the post 100%

Anonymous,  7:31 pm  

Feels good to get a nice rant out of the way huh? I gave up on cellphones and stopped carrying one about a year ago thanks to service and cost issues.

Defenestration?

I always thought that meant to remove windows from something: thanks for setting me straight.

- Ntwiga

Shango,  5:51 am  

Chxta: A LAN, huh? Between Lagos, Abuja, Kaduna, and Kano? A LAN? Perhaps that's why you were having so many problems.

Akin: Interesting thoughts on defenestration. I suppose you'll be very polite to the defenestratee first before the act?

I first heard about defenestration in re William III (the hammer of the Scots, lovely!) and the gay lover of his Prince of Wales.

About This Blog

  © Blogger templates Psi by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008

Back to TOP