Encouraged by the phenomenological success of the tri-bimaximal hypothesis, we postulate that the neutrino mass matrix in the lepton flavour basis is an S3 group matrix in the natural representation of S3. This immediately requires one neutrino to be trimaximally mixed, as suggested by the solar neutrino data. We go on to postulate that the charged-lepton mass matrix in the neutrino mass-basis is an S3 class matrix in the natural representation of the S3 class-algebra, leading to exact tri-bimaximal mixing which is compatible with data overall. The above two postulates are mutually consistent, and imply that the neutrino mass matrix in the flavour basis is an S3⊃S2 class operator, in the natural representation of the S3 group (the S2 being associated with mu-tau interchange). Thus the tri-bimaximal mixing matrix is seen to be closely related to the S3 group characters, and may be properly regarded as simply the table of induction coefficients for the [2]×[1]=[3]+[21] induced representation of S3.