I was sent an email the other day asking whether consumer telecoms is really so different from shampoo and cereal. The default answer is “of course it is.” Different economics, different regulators, different headaches. But I don’t think the gap is as wide as we like to tell ourselves. Parts of it are very similar. Parts are absolutely not.
Let me start with the fast-moving stuff. FMCG lives on thin margins and distribution. Get on the shelf, stay on the shelf, be easy to recognise when someone is half-awake on a Saturday doing the big shop. Prices don’t whiplash every five minutes; promos nudge perception more than they rewrite it. Pack sizes are a quiet superpower: little packs for trial, family tubs for people who’ve already decided you’re “their” brand. The brand story is simple and repetitive: here’s a familiar problem (dryness, oiliness, stickiness), here’s our fix.
Telecoms looks alien next to that. We build or rent enormous networks, argue about spectrum, and sell things that feel closer to utilities than “products.” Sales conversations slide into coverage maps, device finance, and whether this tariff includes EU roaming. Pricing moves around with promotions and bundles, and the contract small print can carry more weight than the advert. Walk into a mono-brand store and the experience is a big part of why you’re there in the first place.
And yet—strip the jargon and some patterns line up. FMCG’s pack architecture has a telco cousin. SIM-only on 30-day terms is your trial size. Mid-usage plans are the family-friendly box in the middle of the aisle. Unlimited is the warehouse tub: good value if you actually use it, great for retention if you don’t. We also have “shelves,” they’re just digital. If your app isn’t on the first swipe and your offer isn’t in the customer’s inbox when their contract ends, you’ve lost a facing. Loyalty isn’t mystical either; it’s habit plus friction: number porting pain, device finance lock-ins, family plans that are a faff to unwind.
Quality shows up differently but matters in the same way. With shampoo, failure is visible on the bathroom shelf. With telecoms, failure is that dead spot on the 07:42 or the buffering during a match—and now the whole thing is public via social media screenshots and crowd-sourced coverage maps. Performance has become part of the brand promise, not just an engineering KPI. FMCG has known that forever: the product *is* the brand.
Two arguments come up a lot:
1) **“Pricing is too volatile in telecoms to compare to FMCG.”**
Tariffs flex more than toothpaste, yes. But FMCG juggles EDLP, high-low, and discounters to steer price perception every week. The shared lesson is price architecture people can understand. Ladders that make sense, trade-ups that feel honest, value signals that don’t trash the brand you’ve spent money to build.
2) **“Resale makes telco unique; there’s no secondary market in FMCG.”**
True-ish. No one sells half a bottle of moisturiser on eBay (I hope). But trade-in, refurb and circularity are now part of a telco’s P&L and story, just as recycling, refills and less plastic have become table stakes in FMCG. Different mechanics, same customer expectation: don’t be wasteful.
Where it truly diverges is capital and cadence. You can tweak a label or ad in FMCG inside a quarter. In telecoms, fibre and radio decisions live for years. That forces a different sort of risk appetite and a ruthless need for simplicity. Every extra option in the catalogue sounds clever in a meeting and adds operational drag in the wild. Customers won’t pay for your complexity.
So what would I borrow?
- From FMCG: an obsession with distribution (digital share of shelf), simple pack/price ladders, and plain-English benefits that answer an actual human problem. “It just works on the train” sells better than “carrier aggregation.”
- From telecoms: long-horizon discipline on investments, retail that earns its keep by improving the experience, and proper lifecycle economics—trade-in, refurb, retention—that treat devices and plans as a system, not a one-off sale.
Same shopper. Different plumbing.
If we let the FMCG instinct make the selling simpler, and keep the telecoms seriousness for the bits that have to be engineered and financed over years, we land in a better place. Not just on the shelf—actually in the basket.
