Marketing myopia

When Bell Atlantic publicized its long-distance pricing plans to New York residents on Jan. 4, the collective ho-hum could be heard from Manhattan to Montauk. Yes, it was big news to industry folk - Telephony cast aside its editorial plan and devoted pages of coverage to the first RBOC's entry into long-distance. But outside the telecom clique, in the homes and businesses where voice and data communications begin and end, I detected the sound of silence.

OK, so we can't expect average New Yorkers to do cartwheels on the subway because they can now get local and long-distance service from the same provider. But Bell Atlantic's initial marketing thrust - as well as those of AT&T, MCI WorldCom and Sprint - was barely noticeable.

What did Bell Atlantic offer to seduce New Yorkers to change long-distance providers? A slightly modified template of the same-old calling plans that AT&T, MCI WorldCom and Sprint already offer. How many of us are going to sit down with an Excel spreadsheet and calculate whether it makes more sense to pay Bell Atlantic 10cents a minute for long-distance calls or pay AT&T 7cents a minute plus a $4.95 monthly fee? Not me. I'm too busy writing about the telecom revolution, a revolution that hasn't seeped into the marketing mindset of the RBOCs yet.

Granted, being first through the door isn't easy. Bell Atlantic, however, seems to have put more energy into winning regulatory approval than figuring out how to win customers' hearts and minds - particularly on the residential side. And that is a big mistake - one that other RBOCs may want to avoid.

Is this a case of fat and happy Bell Atlantic thinking it could win 30% of the market share without even taking a Magic Marker to the whiteboard? Maybe. More likely, Bell Atlantic's stodgy marketing campaign reflects the vestiges of telecom's bygone era, when consumers had no choice and telephone companies' marketing teams were called "departments of revenue requirements."

Communications service providers have made tremendous strides since, but for the most part, they still spend too much time mining customer data and slicing and dicing customer profiles instead of looking at the big picture: presenting a likeable image.

As Theodore Levitt said in his classic Harvard Business Review article (titled the same as this opinion's headline), "The organization must learn to think of itself not as producing goods or services but as buying customers, as doing the things that will make people want to do business with it."

Telcos don't have to look very far afield for apt models - or for the companies that could one day demolish them with their superior marketing skills. Consider Apple's Steve Jobs. I wouldn't wish him on my worst enemy, but he has made Apple products cool again. Then there's Steve Case. America Online is far from cool to the digerati. But it attracted 20 million users and built a market cap big enough to swallow Time Warner by giving online newbies a comfortable, simple on-ramp to the Internet. Only later, when price competition hit the ISP space, did America Online's pricing plans get complex.

That doesn't mean I want Bell Atlantic to do the telecom equivalent of an AOL diskette blitz by calling me during dinnertime or spamming me mercilessly. What do I want? Simple pricing - bucketloads of minutes at a flat rate every day, every hour; rock-solid service, of course; and the intangible - a telephone service that I can brag about at cocktail parties. How about Renee Zellweger as a spokesperson instead of James Earl Jones? Anything to liven up things a little. I don't want my father's telephone service. I want something cooler.