Image Is Everything

Remember the Sprite commercials that tried to convince you that "Image is nothing; thirst is everything?" Well, it's not true for selling soda or any other product.

In the wireless industry, increased competition means more carriers and more confusion for potential subscribers. So what do they look at when making decisions in an overcrowded marketplace? Often, it's not your pricing plans or even your services; it's your image.

"You open up the paper and see 14 different ads for wireless products and services -- what do customers have to fall back on with all that noise and all that clutter?" said Ann Middleman, Research & Consulting vice president at CDB, a strategy consulting firm that focuses on marketing and brand identity.

Image is how your customers perceive you. It is the composite of attributes such as reliability, quality, customer service and stability. According to Middleman, you should cultivate your image carefully because it affects not only your brand's competitiveness, but also your company's. More subtle than product, pricing or distribution, which are easily articulated, image is an idea, an opinion or the characteristics your company presents to prospects and subscribers.

Middleman said subscribers rely on a provider's image before more tangible, pragmatic things such as price plans, availability and services because these are difficult to distinguish.

Ken Woo, AT&T Wireless director of communications, said image is a priority because of marketplace saturation.

"When you say AT&T, the hands go up," he said. "That is competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace where people at least know who we are and what we stand for."

Building Image

If you're a relatively new company or are trying to break into a new market, the first challenge is getting your name into the marketplace.

"In order to establish an image, you have to have the brand awareness to which that image is attached," Middleman said. "What good would it be if people said there was a great new product on the market but didn't know the name of the company?"

New fixed-wireless provider Teligent is making sure everyone knows its name.

Richard Hanna, Teligent senior vice president of sales and marketing, said the provider's New York launch last year set the tone for its image. Teligent became the first company to buy every ad in the World Trade Center's path station when it put up 300 4-foot by 6-foot ads for a month.

"When we launched in New York, the path station was bright red," Hanna said. "The awareness we got out of that was tremendous, and it also created brand. You had 600,000 people a day, including important people on Wall Street, our customers and the landlords we were trying to get buildings from in Manhattan, seeing Teligent."

Hanna said the ads also shaped Teligent's image by projecting credibility and teaching passersby about the company -- what it does, how it bills and how to contact it.

Teligent's ads also convey that it offers a key bundle of services through a single vendor and a simple solution for local, long distance, Internet and data needs.

"What we're trying to do in our imaging is to show we have the technology to not only provide service today for voice and data needs," he said, "but our network and the company is set up to handle data needs tomorrow and five years down the road."

People may remember and recognize your name, but you want them to do so in a positive way.

"All of your advertising and promotional activities have to be appropriate to your product," Middleman explained. "They have to be appropriate to your target market, and they have to convey the qualities that you want to convey."

"Everything we put in front of the customer is consistent with our image, so when they see the advertising, (it) reinforces a theme of 'we want to come in and serve you, we want to keep it simple, we want to give you better service than you're getting today, and we're also going to give you tremendous savings,'" Hanna said.

After Teligent launches service in a building, it strengthens its image with in-building events such as coffee socials where building dwellers can get to know the company and its services.

Tweaking Image

It's important to keep your target subscriber base in mind, especially when you grow so fast that you have to adjust your image to keep pace.

Mark Schweitzer, Nextel vice president of brand marketing, said his focus is small and medium businesses, with the blue-collar segment comprising 65% of the customer base.

Nextel has strengthened its business-focused image during the past few years. It saw the need for an important tactical change early on because its advertising garnered too many consumer responses.

"We've chosen to emphasize different messages as the penetration in particular segments has grown," Schweitzer said. "Over time, we've driven home the message that we are a business-to-wireless solution; we've just added more emphasis ... to business applications."

Today, the core strategy of the company is differentiation in business solutions -- a better alternative, straightforward pricing and the idea that Nextel is not just one of the players but the best choice, he said.

Schweitzer added that subscribers perceive Nextel as a "maverick, aggressive, responsive and willing to rethink the paradigm."

"(We wanted) a clear distinction between a new provider like ourselves and the more established RBOCs and AT&Ts," he said. "We latched onto a few things that we knew had broad interest like no roaming and 1-second rounding."

Other key elements that solidify Nextel's image include network quality, product reliability, simplified pricing, price relative to the value and employees.

Nextel has more than 1,800 direct salespeople and 3,000 retail locations.

"Our image is out there being made every day of the week by our people," Schweitzer said. "We try to have some consistent brand elements in terms of how the product is described and the look, but the people and the distribution channels make up a big piece of the image."

Nextel measures its customer perception in every market every month with a phone survey done by a third-party market-research firm. Nextel polls its target segment of the public and studies its awareness scores, both aided and unaided, and image perceptions.

"More than 80% of our customers come to us very specifically for the level of service integration we offer -- particularly the Direct Connect capability (2-way radio)," Schweitzer said. "In the prospect marketplace, there's a much lower level of awareness of what that is and how it would benefit them, and that's our brand-building challenge."

Maintaining Image

Once a customer signs up, however, advertising has little to do with how he perceives you.

"If you establish brand awareness, you get people to remember your name, and you get them to remember it as being a good product, you have to live up to it," Middleman said. "Image is like any reputation: Easy to trash, difficult to build up."

AT&T Wireless is in the position of living up to a long-standing image. According to Woo, the company is proud and protective of its logo and brand name, and careful about how it is used.

"The brand stands for integrity, advanced technology and ubiquitousness," he said. "The AT&T brand is probably one of the most widely recognized brands in the country. We use that as a competitive advantage."

Woo said key elements that define the provider's image include advanced technology, products that are simple to use and easy to understand, reliability and the idea that AT&T is the best company to do business with.

During the past year, AT&T Wireless' image has become synonymous with its most successful service, Digital One Rate.

"We think it's great," Woo said. "It far surpassed even our most optimistic expectations and our business plan when we decided to roll it out in May of last year."

AT&T leveraged the plan's success, as well as the associated consumer buzz, when it launched its Personal Network. More important, the success of Digital One Rate has solidified AT&T's image as a wireless leader.

Woo said AT&T spends time every day making sure people know what AT&T stands for. The company takes two basic approaches in maintaining its image: The first is through the AT&T Cares group, a community-relations program consisting of employees that volunteer for activities such as highway litter pickups and nursing home visits. AT&T also sustains its image by making sure it offers the services, equipment and programs that represent it in the best light.

Sprite is wrong. Image is everything. It is a reflection of every plan your company executes --service offerings, pricing, customer service, advertising, sales, network quality -- and you should cultivate it with care.