Home - News , Refill Deals , Sprint , Virgin Mobile - Virgin Mobile Test Marketing Five Months Free Service With Phone Purchase Offer









According to Claure, Boost Mobile subscribers increased late last year, for the first time in many quarters. Claure said that Sprint will use Boost to compete directly with other carriers' prepaid brands and that Virgin Mobile will become Sprint's "disruptive" prepaid brand.





Claure said that, as part of its disruptive strategy, Virgin Mobile is test marketing a concept where instead of offering prepaid phones at subsidized prices as they do now, they are selling phones at full price but bundled with free airtime.



Wave7 Research's Jeffrey Moore spotted an example of Virgin's new strategy at a Best Buy store in Kansas last month. The store had prominent signage, as shown in the images above and below, offering customers five months free service in return for buying an LG X Power Android phone for $179.99. Jeffrey and I checked other Best Buy stores did not find any others with the offer.

The free service is on Virgin's $35/month plan that includes unlimited talk, text and data with the first 5 GB at high speeds. The airtime is worth $175 so you are basically getting the phone for $5. Virgin's regular full price for the X Power is for $149.99, although it's available for as little as $59.99 from online vendors.





Selling a phone bundled with airtime is not new, TracFone has been doing it for years with phone plus airtime bundles on HSN . T-Mobile Prepaid is also using the same model, giving customers a f ree Samsung Galaxy On5 if they buy $100 worth of airtime,





I'm not sure I'd really call a phone with bundled airtime disruptive, but I suspect its been effective for TracFone or they wouldn't keep doing it. Virgin's phone bundled with airtime is a good deal if the Sprint network meets your needs. I'm sure the bundle will appeal to some customers but I doubt it's enough by itself to revitalize the Virgin Mobile brand. That will take advertising dollars and better plan pricing. Getting rid of Sprint's restrictions on BYOP and allowing any new or used Sprint network compatible phone on Virgin would help too.

At an investor's conference last week, Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure said that the carrier will be putting more emphasis on its Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile prepaid brands in 2017. I say it's about time, Sprint has lost prepaid users for the last six quarters in a row, shedding a total of 2 million prepaid customers since Q1, 2015. In the same period AT&T gained 3 million and T-Mobile gained 2.9 million prepaid customers.Sources: FierceWireless Wave7 Research . Images: Wave7 Research