Marketing Lesson: Getting Attention by Tweaking the Cellphone Companies

The goal of any marketing campaign is to get attention for your company and product. Ideally, this attention should be positive and reflect what you want people to think about the brand, but it you're young and unknown, almost any sort of attention (short of the kind which includes the word "indicted") will do.

Simply stated, hard to accomplish.

There's so much noise out there that cutting through the clutter and getting people to notice you is hard, or expensive, or often both. We recently learned an important marketing lesson, though: Harness Popular Feeling. We did this by rating the top four mobile phone companies for their customer service (AT&T Wireless, Cingular, SprintPCS, and Verizon Wireless).

Traditional advertising media simply weren't giving us any measurable response, and being a bootstrap startup, we can't afford to do the saturation advertising which was so popular during the dot-com boom. Besides, if some direct-mail and magazine advertising wasn't working, why would we expect that more would work better? The one marketing technique which we had found highly effective was attending industry trade-shows. This, however, has the downside of only happening a couple times each year, as well as being incredibly disruptive.

One thing we had noticed, though, was that nobody in the company could go to a cocktail party without getting buried in stories about someone's terrible experience calling some company. Since our business is measuring the quality of customer service, people wanted to vent about what happened when they called Big Company So-and-So, and how badly they screwed up.

So, we put together a new service where we track big companies' customer service, and compare them to each other. The first report covered the aforementioned mobile phone companies, and we issued a press release talking about the winners and losers.

In the first couple days, we had thousands of people visit our website to download a summary of the report. We even sold a copy (which was unexpected for the first report--we figure revenue will come as we repeat the research over time). We garnered leads, customer interest, and lots of traffic. Reporters called and E-mailed us to ask questions, and trade publications which wouldn't write about us before were suddenly asking for more data for articles.

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to know who won the customer service race between AT&T Wireless, Cingular, SprintPCS, and Verizon Wireless.

The most surreal part was spending 45 minutes on the phone with a PR manager from one of the four companies (I won't say who). He spent 40 minutes telling me how everything we were doing was wrong. Then, in the last five minutes he shifted to, "Speaking personally, gentleman to gentleman, I think the world needs more companies like you."

We had tapped into a couple of powerful currents in the American psyche: Everyone Hates Customer Service, and Everyone Loves a Horserace. The result was more free publicity over one press release than we had garnered since day one.

We will, of course, be repeating the study of the mobile phone companies. We'll be picking on another industry, too, in the not-too-distant future.