Playing the ethnic (SIM) card

KPN has just announced the launch of the Ay Yildiz brand (which means "Crescent and Star" - shame the website doesn't seem to work at present, probably because the launch is Monday) targeting the 2.6m-strong Turkish community in Germany on its own E-Plus network. KPN's Belgian subsidiary has had this brand in place in Belgium for two years, and it's quizzical that they didn't try this idea before now - after all Germany has the largest Turkish population outside Turkey. This sort of ethnic affinity branding has been common in the calling card market for a long time, and I have seen one or two examples in the access-independent VoIP space, so it's nice to see the cellular world actively pursuing some more granular market segmentation. Endless variations of this approach should now spring up across Europe (please ping me if you have other examples), and I can already see a huge number of no-brainers for ethnic affinity brands in what is now an untapped market.