Ontela Picdeck

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Introduction

        Founded in 2006, Ontela was a start-up company based out of Seattle. Ontela created PicDeck which was a technological service that enabled end users to transfer pictures and other data from their mobile devices to social plastforms, email, computers, laptops and even storage devices. The technology was well received in the media and was claimed to have “helped bridge the gap between phone and computer.” (Sawhney, et al., 2009) Essentially Ontela had found a way to simplify the mobile imaging experience.

The business model was arranged in such a fashion that saw users subscribe to pay a monthly fee to carriers for using the PicDeck platform. With continuous growth within the industry, Ontela had developed a service that was new and valuable to the end user, which meant opportunity. For PicDeck to take off, Ontela would need to be able to answer some key questions related to their target customer segments and how they would position themselves. We will dive into these key questions below.

Based on the Customer personas, which customer segment should Ontela target?

As Ontela looks to establish which customer segment to target they must understand the varying customer personas apparent in their situation. A customer persona relates to the creation of fictional characters that are used to symbolize the varying user types within a targeted demographic. This also pertains to cultural and behavioural aspects that establish and predict the way certain groups might respond to a brand or product.

Ontela based the needs of their customers off of three different personas in order to establish their marketing strategy. The first persona was based on Sarah, a 42 year old married mother of 3, who was working part time from home. She in no way was considered to be technologically aware and would get frustrated trying to do things computer related. Often times resorting to asking her kids to complete tasks for her. She was big on just using a normal camera for family pictures but often needed help transferring these pictures to her computer. In her mind the idea of an automatic transfer sounded amazing but couldn’t even begin to fathom how that might be possible. (Sawhney, et al., 2009)

The second persona embodied Steve, a 27 year old real estate agent who grew up in the digital age but was a really late adopter when it came to anything technology related. His job required the need for him to take and send pictures however he was very old fashioned in his methodology, even though he knew there were better methods out there. Nevertheless, he saw the value in what PicDeck had to offer, his hesitations in switching to newer methods however, came from his fear of losing other important information he had on his phone and couldn’t part with. (Sawhney, et al., 2009)