When you think of ringback tone, the first thing that probably pops into your mind is a personalized music played when you wait for the person called to answer. However, Turkcell (Turkey) has widen its ringback tone offering thanks to a creative thinking of what can be nice to hear while waiting.
But first - some details about Turkcell:
Turkcell is the 3rd largest mobile operator in Europe in terms of number of subscribers. Turkcell is the market leader with 62% Turkish market share, which are 29.8 million users. Turkcell has launched its ringback tones service in March 2005, based on Ericsson hardware and ECT software.
Turkcell’s ringback tone service, “ÇalarkenDinlet”, or in English - “make them listen while ringing” is the biggest ringback tone service in Europe, with more than 2 million active subscribers(!). It is also the most popular and most successful value added service of Turkcell.
Turkcell enriched its ringback tone portfolio with many creative non-music content categories (apart to a wide selection of music); one of the categories offered by Turkcell is the Status ringback tones with 20 different situations of the called person (in a restaurant, taking a shower, in a meeting, watching a movie, driving a car, etc’ - influenced by the IM??). Other category is the Horoscope ringback tones allowing your caller to hear their horoscope while waiting. Other kind of ringback tone offered by Turkcell is the famous football matches moments (what do you think about that, boys?). Last, for its launch, Turkcell used its most powerful content category of Funny Quotes and its viral effect (you can see the ads here). As for its advertising strategy, Turkcell uses new content as the reason/cause to advertise and promote the ringback tone service.
Turkcell is a great example how “thinking out of the box” can help operators build a creative and 
wider offering which attracts many more users to the service. And I’ll end this post with a very nice inside story from the Worldwide Ringback Tone Marketing Seminar initiated by Comverse. During the Marketing Seminar, operators were asked to present their ringback tone services as study cases of successful marketing strategies. One of them was Turkcell’s presentation of the reasons for its ringback tone service’s success. Today we know that one of executives participating at the Seminar liked so much some of Turkcell's insights that he went back home and persuaded his management to implement them! This is a sure proof that the Comverse Seminar brought real value to the operators who attended.
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