A lower tariff is honest only when it names the help it removes

I believe a lower mobile tariff should be launched with a short, specific list of what it no longer includes, displayed beside the price and given the same care as the price. My argument is not about generosity. It is about where a customer learns the truth. If we do not tell them what a cheaper plan removes, they learn it at a shop counter, often on the day they need help, and from a person who did not design the plan. The price reduction then becomes a broken promise, even though nothing we said was false.

The Japanese market of the early 2020s made this argument practical rather than theoretical. After the government pressed operators to lower mobile charges, every national operator introduced cheaper plans within a short period. The networks were broadly comparable, and so were the headline prices. What differed was what each price had been stripped of to reach its figure. Customers compared the yen in advertisements. They discovered the differences later.

The price was never only the monthly figure

A mobile tariff in Japan has long been a bundle. For years the monthly charge paid for network access, but also for a shop that would move contacts to a new handset, explain a confusing bill, reset a forgotten password and sit with a customer for an hour while a family arrangement was rebuilt. It often included an email address tied to the operator, family discounts that depended on several relatives staying together, and optional services that arrived free for a month.

When prices fell, much of the saving came from removing parts of that bundle. Online-only plans do not include free shop assistance. Some exclude the operator email address. Some sit outside family discount structures. None of these choices is wrong. A customer who never visits a shop should not pay for one, and a lower price is a real benefit to a household budget. The difficulty is that the bundle had never been described as a bundle. Customers did not know they were paying for the shop until the shop began charging them.

At Hinoura Communications we saw this within months of launch. Customers who had moved to our online plan for its price returned to shops for help transferring photographs to a new handset, and were told about a per-visit charge they had not noticed. Their complaint was rarely about the amount. It was about surprise. Several said, in different words, that they would have chosen the same plan if someone had told them. That sentence has shaped my view of pricing communication ever since, because it means the omission cost us goodwill without even changing the customer's choice.

Why I kept the cheaper plan under our own name

In late 2020 our board considered launching the lower-priced plan under a separate brand. The case for doing so was strong, and capable colleagues made it. A separate brand would slow migration from our higher-priced plans, protect the shops run by our partner agencies and give us room to retreat if the market settled differently. Operators in other circumstances chose versions of that structure, and I do not claim they were wrong for their own situations.

I argued against it for Hinoura, for one reason above the others. A separate brand would have allowed us to avoid the explanation. The new name would carry the low price, the old name would carry the service, and nobody would need to say plainly that the difference between them was the help. I thought customers would compare the two anyway, because comparing mobile prices had become a national habit, and that our silence would look like concealment once they did.

The decision cost money, and I have never presented it otherwise. Over two years about ¥31 billion of annual service revenue moved away as customers migrated to the cheaper plan. Average revenue per user in our consumer base fell from ¥4,880 to ¥4,190. A separate brand would probably have slowed that decline. What we gained was lower churn, fewer complaints about unexpected charges and a brand that meant the same thing at every price. Monthly handset churn fell from 1.08% to 0.81%. I cannot prove that the exclusions list caused that improvement, because the price change itself was the larger force. I can say that customers who joined the online plan complained about unexpected charges in their first ninety days 40% less often than customers who joined through our shops.

There is a fair counter-argument. Advertising space is limited, competitors advertise only the price, and a list of exclusions looks like a confession beside a rival's clean headline. I took that seriously. Our answer was to keep the list to seven items, use ordinary words, and place it on the plan page and in the order confirmation rather than in a fifteen-second advertisement. A list does not need to appear in every medium. It needs to appear where the customer makes the decision, and it needs to be read before the contract rather than discovered after it.

Write the withdrawal list before the advertisement

The discipline I now apply is simple. Before any new tariff is approved, the pricing team writes the withdrawal list: every service, discount, entitlement or form of help that a customer moving to this plan from our most common existing plan would lose. Then a shop employee, not a marketer, reads it and tells us what customers will ask. If the pricing team cannot write the list, the plan is not ready. If the list runs beyond ten items, the plan is probably too complicated to explain, and we simplify it before we advertise it.

This changes the conversation inside the company. A withdrawal list makes the trade visible to finance, which can see which removals carry the saving. It makes it visible to shop partners, who can prepare their staff before the first customer arrives. It also makes it visible to the board. Directors approving a lower price should know what service is being removed and which customers are most likely to miss it. In Japan, those customers are disproportionately older, and they are also the customers most likely to depend on a shop.

The list also needs a review date. Our first per-visit shop charge fell hardest on customers who had moved for the price but still needed help moving data to a new handset. We waived that charge for data transfer in 2022, and we should have tested it with older customers before launch rather than afterwards. A withdrawal list is a commitment to watch what happens when the help disappears, not a disclaimer that settles the matter.

I would ask any marketing or pricing leader facing a lower-price launch to try the exercise on their own plans. Take the cheapest tariff and the most common one. Write down what the cheaper one removes. Ask a shop employee which item will cause the most return visits. Then decide whether the customer can see that item before they agree. The yen figure will always lead the advertisement. The honest version of the offer is that figure together with what it no longer pays for.