Alcatel-Lucent: Marketing the Cell Phone as a Mobile Wallet - Teaching Note

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) was preparing itself for the launch of a new business: mobile payment services. Mobile payment involves transactions between consumers and merchants, or among consumers, using their mobilie phones, and the emergence of a new technology in which ALU had strong expertise - near-filed communication (NFC) - represented a huge opportunity, as analysts expected the market for mobile payments to explode in the coming years. Yet, ALU would need to carefully craft the positioning of the new service, segment the market and choose which customers to target to avoid possibly severe adoption hurdles.