Through several years of consolidation, the wireless industry has witnessed the creation of national carrier giants whose brands are as pervasive as their network coverage, and whose national coverage, in fact, seems to be the main asset behind their branding. The often-asked question amid all of the mergers and acquisitions that created these giants is, “How will any of the smaller, independent wireless carriers survive?”

It turns out that at least one of those smaller companies — Centennial Corp. — was one of the voices asking that question, and it eventually came up with an answer: by creating a locally focused marketing strategy that values the unique character and complexities of a single market over the blanket, one-size-fits-all approach of a national service provider.

“Five years ago, we watched the industry start to consolidate, and at that time, we had to ask ourselves what we could do in this environment to be able to compete in the long term,” said Michael Small, CEO of Centennial Corp., based in Wall, N.J. “The answer was our local markets strategy. We decided to be conscious of the fact that customers in different geographic areas have different needs.”

It's an approach that a national carrier like Cingular Wireless, with about 54 million customers in the U.S., can't afford to employ, but that Centennial, with 614,000 customers in the U.S. and 724,000 in the Caribbean, can't afford not to employ. After adding 59,400 subscribers in the U.S. during its most recently reported quarter (the second quarter of its fiscal year, which ended Nov. 30, 2005) the approach seems to be working.

“I think that our continued survival in a land of the giants over the last five years has proved that strategy works,” Small said.

And he's not the only one who thinks so. Small was asked to speak on the topic of improving the customer experience at the Telecommunications and Media Customer Strategy Summit in Atlanta earlier this month. The event, hosted by Thought Leadership Summits, presents case studies on how companies in telecom and media can improve sales, service marketing and IT practices.

A large part of Small's story at the conference was not only the company's localized marketing plans but also local management teams that may be much more strategically empowered than the regional teams of national carriers. Centennial has two primary clusters of local markets in the U.S., one in the Midwest that has coverage mostly in Michigan and Indiana, and the other in the Southeast, largely covering Louisiana and fringes of other states.

Small said it is those local market teams that have most of the authority, having great influence on services, packages, marketing and pricing. “If you look at our corporate office, it's not necessarily stronger than what you might find at the larger carriers, but I honestly don't think that the regional marketing vice presidents at the big companies would be able to cut it on our local teams because our local management people have way more decision-making authority.”

Finding people with the right experience and makeup to work on those local teams has been a big challenge, Small said. “We've searched throughout the Americas to get the right people for both our domestic and Caribbean operations, and it has taken us some time to get that just right,” he said.

The company's Caribbean operations, primarily in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, have been part of Centennial for the last 10 years (its domestic operations began in 1988). The company beat many other non-Caribbean service providers into a regional market that only recently has begun to mature.

“We've had quite a run in the Caribbean,” Small said.

True to form, Centennial never tried to make a carbon copy of what seemed to work in the U.S. and transport it to the Caribbean. In fact, while its U.S. markets use GSM network equipment that was naturally migrated from Centennial's original TDMA facilities, Centennial chose CDMA gear for the Caribbean buildout at a time when that technology was just becoming the popular choice for greenfield network construction (Centennial actually owns a piece of telecom history by becoming the first carrier to launch a CDMA network — for its Puerto Rico coverage — in 1996.)

Also different was the carrier's payments strategy. Much of Centennial's earliest success in Puerto Rico came from offering postpaid buckets of voice minutes, rather than the prepaid approach that many service providers in emerging markets were using. "A larger part of our success has been because we correctly called it as a postpaid market early on," a company spokesman said.

“We have talented local management in the marketplace [in the Caribbean] who are making those kinds of decisions, rather than being told by someone in a distant U.S. city how to run the market,” Small said at this month's Merrill Lynch Global Communications Forum, when asked to describe the company's business strategy in the Caribbean.

Ten years after its entry into the Caribbean market, Centennial is just one of many foreign and home-grown service providers targeting a rapidly deregulating region with huge growth opportunity. They are joined by incumbents like Cable & Wireless, as well as relative newcomers like Digicel. Small said that Puerto Rico is now a six-competitor market and that Centennial ultimately must be among the top three providers to be successful. Despite the early success, Centennial recently has experienced a few growing pains in its Caribbean markets. The company adjusted its outlook for 2006 just a few weeks ago to reflect lower expected income.

Prior to that, on the company's second-quarter conference call in January, analyst Arion Mailer of Credit Suisse pointed out that Centennial's practice of offering larger and larger buckets of postpaid minutes has been matched by competitors.

Small admitted that the company's earlier growth in Puerto Rico had subsided. “We've realized that offering has run its course,” he said on the conference call.

More recently, he expanded on that answer. “We've lost some momentum in the Caribbean. We had been offering them buckets of minutes, and at about 1500 minutes per month, we found people didn't want anymore voice minutes,” he said. “They wanted more services. We need to meet their needs with more wireless bandwidth.”

That may be one of the few crossover points between Centennial's U.S. and Caribbean markets. No matter the location — Michigan, Louisiana, Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic — mobile data and content is the new competitive battleground.

“The rough cut in consolidation has probably occurred by now, but the new industry trend affecting competition is the wireless device evolving into the third or fourth screen for a lot of consumers,” Small said. “But the content they will want in each market will be different. What they want in the Caribbean will be different than what they want in the U.S. [In mobile gaming], it could be dominoes versus poker. But we're a company that is leveraged in that way, and we plan to deliver.”