Mint Mobile is a beloved mobile company owned and fronted by Ryan Reynolds. This podcast showcases why the brand is so popular with the public. Hint: customer experience.
As usual, you can find this podcast episode on major podcast platforms: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeartMedia, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, and Anchor.
Table of Contents
Introduction – Mint Mobile
Mint Mobile was founded in 2015 as Mint SIM under the subsidiary of Ultra Mobile by David Glickman and Rizwan Kassim. Ryan Reynolds got involved in 2019 by purchasing 20-25% of the company.
The brand operates as a pay-as-you-go model where customers pre-pay for at least three months of service at one time.
The company uses T-Mobile’s network to provide voice, text, and data services.
Transcript
Larry/DeAnn
Hi, this is another episode, retail Mashup, the podcast. I’m Larry. And I’m Dean. This podcast talks about retail customer experience and insights, and we focus primarily on revenue generation. Where are the opportunities and where are some of the drawbacks? And this episode, I want to talk about Mint Mobile.
Mint Mobile And Customer Experience
Larry
For those of you who don’t know Mint Mobile. It’s fronted by Ryan Reynolds, the actor who has created a brand that has been such a talk of the town for the last five years. And how do they make it really different than a normal mobile brand? They focus on the customer experience and what they do yesterday, it’s a prepaid plan.
So you can pay anywhere from three months, six months, or nine months, and then you will be allotted with the same mobile features that other companies like T-Mobile would have, such as call forwarding, calling minutes, and text messaging. And the differences between the different plans would be the number of gigabytes that you may get from the plan itself.
So for say $15 to $30, you may get four gigabytes of data versus unlimited. What I love about this brand is how consumer friendly it may be. They understand that not everyone may be able to afford all the different types of features available, or maybe they don’t need to use all the data, so they carved out a beginner’s plan, if you may.
Oh, why don’t you try this first and then see if you like it? If you need more data, you can always go up. We would monitor how you use your data on a monthly basis over, say a three-month period, we would then give you an analysis of how much data you use and what would be the best plan for you moving forward.
What It Means To Think For The Customer And Earn Loyalty Through Caring?
I like that – thinking for the customer. And in some cases, I have seen as a first that it may actually tell a customer that perhaps you don’t need unlimited data because you have only been using less than 10 gigabytes of data per month. Maybe you should downgrade your platform unlimited, costing you more money to a plan that costs you less.
So it has been getting a big following. On top of it all, they have Ryan Reynolds doing national commercials. In many states, you may have seen him on a billboard. On top of everything. Mint mobile. Can you think about just using the word mint on everything? It could be mint chocolate ice cream.
You can then have a partnership with Mint Mobile. Maybe it’s just regular mint. Maybe it’s even toothpaste that you can have a lead in with Mint Mobile. It has been an amazing brand to be featured. Now, this week there was big news that MI mobile is being purchased by T-Mobile for US$1.35 billion dollars.
Ryan Reynolds will continue to be part of the creative team, but no longer an owner. I’m hoping that the Mint Mobile philosophy is how they really go after the customer experience and show empathy. and not thinking about earning money from you, but earning trust from you so that you would be willing to spend more money.
That type of philosophy could be translatable over to T-Mobile. So that’s my story of the week.
The Discussion
DeAnn
I saw that as well and thought, it’s good to be king Ryan. I think I’m of two minds. I think T-Mobile is the perfect home for it. T-Mobile acquired Sprint. They put a lot of effort into providing multiple tiers of service for multiple price-range customers.
And they have a fun image. They’re a little more hip. They have pink, it’ll go with the mint color very nicely. But at the same time, I worry about the implications of merging so much of the budget market into one home. And one of the reasons why Mint Mobile was popular was because they were an alternative priced entity.
There was another choice for people who pay-as-you-go service or affordable options for having a cell phone. So now those options have been significantly reduced and we’ll see if the deal goes through. We’ll see what happens in the future. I do think T-Mobile is very cognizant of helping the underserved.
They didn’t have the level of customer service that Mint Mobile did. They’re a big company with a lot of customers. It’s very difficult to maintain a more intimate level of customer service over such a large customer base. So time will tell what happens with the.
Larry
T-Mobile definitely has grown over the years from the little guy, if you may, to a much bigger player. And their starting price points as has quipped up significantly over the years from $40 per line. Now starting point could easily be $50 per month on a month-to-month basis based on a credit check.
It is harder for potential customers to get into the T-Mobile game versus Mint Mobile. As long as you are paying them on a 3, 6, 9, or 12-month basis, they would be able to provide you with a line. That type of service is not available for t-mobile customers potentially. And as you said, I’m hoping that Mint Mobile will continue to operate as a sub-brand and will be separate from T-Mobile overall and not, not completely merged in mm-hmm.
And as you said, there are potential opportunities to partner between the brands, and because the mint color goes with the pink actually rather well.
DeAnn
One of the reasons why T-Mobile bought Sprint years ago. Sprint owned the largest share of 5G connectivity. Sprint had just been quietly buying up 5G connections and building that infrastructure out before any of the other phone companies realized the impact that it would have.
So, T-Mobile snapped it up, giving them the largest share of 5G infrastructure. and a lot of other companies, even AT&T borrow from that infrastructure for part of their service.
So doing this deal does give Mint Mobile access to a far better 5G network, which given the direction that technology is headed, is going to become extremely important in the next couple of years. So from that respect, I think it’s a really smart move for Mint Mobile to do this.
Larry
Well, interesting you said that because Mint Mobile already used T-Mobile’s network previously, and so this would give them more of a leg-up in terms of having priority on the traffic.
Mint Mobile subscribers would be able to priority of the bandwidth for between 4G and or 5G traffic. It’s gonna be great for them. But in the meantime, it’s important given the direct relationship between me, mobile, and its customers, that they continue to keep up with communication and be transparent on what’s next.
What customers don’t want is to see that their beloved brand got changed significantly and that the fundamentals of the brand are. If that is to change significantly, then the customer would like to know that quickly and not be living in uncertainty.
DeAnn/Larry
Exactly.
So that is my idea for the week. If you like this episode and the podcast, please subscribe and we will talk to you next time. Sounds great.
* We made some modifications to the transcript to improve understandability and flow.
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