- T-Mobile launched T-Mix, where customers get "Picks" to put toward streaming, music, gaming, food delivery, sports, AI, wireless benefits and device promotions
- Customers choose which perks go in their plans and can swap them out after 90 days
- The launch lineup includes Apple, Delta, DoorDash, ESPN, Google, Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, Paramount+, SiriusXM, Xbox and YouTube
LOS ANGELES—What a week. Here’s how T-Mobile Chief Operating Officer Jon Freier summed it up: A lot of “crazy stuff” happened, bringing “this wave of change, this wave of disruption.”
He wasn’t talking about the election, the stock market or even Elon Musk’s foray into wireless. No, this was all about T-Mix, the new plan the “un-carrier” has been quietly touting for weeks. Thursday’s theatrics* were all about raising awareness, complete with roving robots, noisy roosters and award-winning actor Bryan Cranston.
Those last three weren’t actually physically on stage with T-Mobile, but they were presented via video – Cranston carrying the rooster in a new ad for T-Mobile and a robot safely crossing a street thanks to AI and the intelligence of T-Mobile’s network.
The show went full throttle. “Some of the world's most iconic and disruptive brands have decided to partner with us to make things better for customers,” said Lucy McLellan, chief brand and communications officer at T-Mobile. “Our mission has always been to challenge the status quo, to question industry conventions, but ultimately to make things better for the life of our customers. We are always trying to find new ways to be different, and that's what today is mostly about: challenging what's possible, making it real, and making it super exciting.”
T-Mobile’s preparations began a long time ago
Behind the scenes, a lot of research led up to the shindig. The concept surrounding T-Mix started to emerge almost a year ago – the idea being that customers pay for a lot of stuff they don’t actually use and they don’t have a lot of say in the matter.
It sprang in part from T-Mobile Tuesdays, where T-Mobile customers can pick from a smorgasbord of freebies. According to T-Mobile, people who took advantage of weekly perks through T-Mobile Tuesdays last year got more than $900 worth of free stuff.
With T-Mix, the “un-carrier” adds “a giant leap in personalization” with the introduction of Picks. Customers can use Picks toward a range of things spanning streaming, music, gaming, food delivery, sports, AI, wireless benefits and device promotions – and customers get to choose which benefits are included in their plans.
André Almeida, chief commercial officer at T-Mobile, said the company saw an opportunity to disrupt – including its own business practices.
But they didn’t rush into it. “There was a lot of groundwork, not just on building the technology, but then testing the technology with customers to make sure this is actually something customers can use and something that’s intuitive to customers and to our front line,” he told Fierce.
T-Mobile took the very unusual step to launch live tests in the Kansas City, Mo., market, in early October. This meant telling the world what they were up to, more or less, or as Almeida said: eating their own dog food.
Almeida, as well as Freier and Chief Marketing Officer Alan Samson, spent several days in Kansas City talking to mobile experts and customers ahead of the launch so they could see what was working and not working and address problems before they made the big pitch nationwide.
“There was a lot of feedback and a lot of learning coming from our front line directly, but also us interacting with customers there,” Almeida said.
Typically, they’ll train the frontline retail store associates three or four days before they launch a new price plan like this because they want to reduce the risk of rivals and everyone else seeing what they’re up to. This time was different. “We leaked it ourselves, so we were able to train all of our frontline people two weeks in advance,” he said.
That also entailed getting senior store managers – thousands of people who work at more than 5,000 stores across the country – together for a meeting in Dallas last month before all this went down. They needed to make sure everyone knew the details behind T-Mix in order to sell it – and explain it – to the masses.
“We wanted to make sure that the managers and assistant managers of all our channels were really understanding what we're trying to do,” he said. “We were able to get their feedback on where they think we need improvement and then go back and train everyone.”
T-Mobile: Consumers want more choice
According to Samson, when they asked people what they pay for subscriptions on a monthly basis, many of them said about $80 or $90. But in actuality, the average household is paying more than $200/month – including for subscriptions they no longer want.
T-Mix is designed to give them more control – they can pick the perks they want and switch them out after 90 days if they want something else.
How much savings people can get from T-Mix remains to be seen. For example, Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Anshel Sag said on X that he asked Claude to analyze the new T-Mobile plans against what he’s already using with T-Mobile Go 5G Plus.
The result was “there’s no meaningful change or reason for me to upgrade. I think T-Mo is overcomplicating things and should offer simple plans for people who want them,” he said.
Avi Greengart, founder and lead analyst at Techsponential, attended Thursday’s launch event. He said if you’re already a T-Mobile customer, getting on T-Mix is “almost a no brainer, in the sense that you're already paying for this, and you're already using the T-Life app.”
Put another way, if you’re already using T-Life and you’re getting a certain number of benefits, “wouldn’t you want to customize those benefits to things you actually use? Maybe you don’t watch Netflix. Maybe you get Netflix some other way and instead now you want Apple Music, or you don’t want Apple, you want Pandora. All of these things are solving a real pain point for people,” he said. “Now you’ll have more control.”
To be sure, the T-Life app is an integral part of this. “That's how you find out about T-Mobile Tuesdays. That's how you change your plan,” he said, noting that you need to use T-Life in order to get T-Mix.
It’s not entirely novel in the sense that Verizon offers something called +play, but that “was very, very complicated and they’ve sort of backed away from promoting that,” and put more emphasis on their Verizon Simplicity plans, he said.
Is it something others can replicate? “Absolutely, it's just expensive,” he said – and takes time to establish partnerships.
The event on Thursday included a tour of a “T-Mix house,” an actual house where they showcased the brands that are partnering with T-Mobile: Apple, Delta, DoorDash, ESPN, Google, Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, Paramount+, SiriusXM, Xbox and YouTube.
On stage earlier in the day, Samson acknowledged that “anybody can copy a promotion.” But T-Mobile thinks what it’s doing is differentiated enough that it will be difficult for rivals to mimic it. For example, it took a few years to get 32 million customers to download the T-Life app and it’s spent years acquiring “great partners” like Netflix, he said.
T-Mobile made plenty of noise announcing its new T-Mix. Now it has to prove it’s worth the wake-up call.
*T-Mobile paid for this reporter’s travel and accommodation to attend this event.
Read more stories about T-Mobile on Fierce Network:
T-Mobile’s next ‘un-carrier’ move: T-Mix – with new picks and perks
T-Mobile’s 5G ‘refresh’ triggers customer backlash
T-Mobile says older-plan customers need 5G refresh