The Medium and the Message

Dr. Joseph Turow is the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. He is also the author of “Media Today: An Introduction to Mass Communication” and “Breaking Up America: Advertising and the New Media World.” With wireless number portability scheduled to take effect Nov. 24 and carriers bracing for significant subscriber upheaval, Turow talked to Wireless Review about why the wireless industry must improve customer relations and more effectively advertise its services.

Loyalty branding means creating an image in the consumer’s mind that will encourage that consumer to come back to the product. “Retention” is the magic word, not necessarily “customer satisfaction.” And that’s an interesting issue: What is the relationship between retention and customer satisfaction? If you’re not satisfied, it probably means you won’t come back, but even if you are satisfied, it doesn’t mean you’ll come back, either. The product must work for the consumer in ways other products are perceived not to, or because it’s so difficult to change in the cost/benefit analysis that you’ll stick to it.

That second part is often what marketers use today to retain people, and I think that is probably the most cynical way to do it. It causes a lot of customer dissatisfaction even when there is retention. That’s a situation where you can have retention and some sort of customer dissatisfaction, and I would argue that a lot of that is what’s happening now in the cell phone industry.

The name of the game in advertising is anxiety. Advertisers feel an enormous amount of anxiety because they have to come up with ways to convince consumers to buy products and services. The way they try to get rid of their anxiety is to transform it into consumer anxiety, which supposedly can be alleviated through purchasing the advertiser’s product. That has gone on for a couple of hundred years. If you read Ben Franklin’s ads for the Franklin Stove, they’re fascinating--he talks about the technical aspects of the stove and why it’s good for heating up the house, but he also talks about women’s skin, and says it will help women not age as quickly as they would if they were sitting closer to the typical fireplace. He was quite aware that people often have anxieties that relate to their personal appearance and their individual presence in society--and since the late 19th century, with the rise of brands, that kind of anxiety has increased, as has the desire for advertisers to use that anxiety to motivate the purchase of their products.

In the cell phone industry, it’s obvious that the anxiety a person feels before he or she buys a phone might be, “Will I get the connection wherever I want?” Like Verizon--“Can you hear me now?” For people who are anxious about whether or not the phone will work in particular areas, the idea is that advertising will relieve that anxiety and remind you of it at the same time. The problem is, if you’re trying to create anxiety in your customers, how can you truly establish a relationship with them in any real way? Is the term “relationship marketing” an oxymoron from that standpoint?

I’m not suggesting that advertisers should not create connections to customers. But I am suggesting that when marketers use terms like “loyalty,” “community” and “relationship,” they are to an extent fooling themselves with words. In a marketing environment, those words may not mean anything like what they mean in real life. If you think what you’re really doing is creating loyalty in a consumer, that’s going to lead you astray. What they’re really trying to do is to create anxiety and a way to solve that anxiety through retaining that consumer. I have a hard time connecting that to the idea of loyalty.

I can’t pretend to tell people who are steeped in this everyday and know so much about their own brand and their own customers what to do--it’s chutzpah. But there are so many things that the cellular phone industry does wrong that they surely must know about. Customer service is virtually non-existent from my experience. When I try to dial my carrier, it’ll take me 10 minutes to get on, and often I won’t even get to the right person. The store in my area is absurdly crowded, and has no idea of triaging customers. The other thing is that despite everything that Verizon or AT&T Wireless or Cingular says, the ability to seamlessly get calls between areas is so oversold that people get angry simply because they really believe that it is possible to equate a cellular phone with a wireline phone.

Wireless serves a purpose. The idea that this phone has become part of life is the part that people are going to stick with. But do you know how many people have told me that they are holding onto their cellular company until phone numbers become transferable? Then they’re going to drop their company like a hot potato. You’re going to see a lot of changing going on, which in my mind reflects this idea of consumer loyalty and retention. Basically, what the phone business has done is use artificial means like contracts and free phones and not being able to transfer numbers as a means to keep customers. Now, that whole rug is going to be taken from under them. The phone industry is the one place that has shown high evidence of customer dissatisfaction and, until now, strong evidence of retention. That’s what’s likely to change. The cellular phone business has been capturing customers in ways that are artificial--take that away, and we’re going to see musical chairs, not just for pricing reasons but because people are so frustrated with their service.

So it all comes down to better service. It’s very odd to say, but maybe the cell phone industry should draw their lessons from banks today--around here, there’s enormous competition for customers between consumer banks. Some banks are now open seven days a week, and there are lots of different segments of the market that they’re going after. The main thing they’re doing is putting enormous resources into customer service. With the cell phone companies, they’re reaching these huge territories but they still haven’t learned about customer service--they haven’t learned the lessons the banks and credit card companies have learned. The level of knowledge of people working in their stores is basically that of the early high school student, and that’s a shame.

Customer service is an art and a science. The fortunate thing for these companies is that they all seem to be equally bad, so consumers don’t have much choice. Once one of these companies gets it right, they may be able to steal a lot of customers. The trick is to forget about words like “loyalty” and “relationships,” and just get the job done. --As told to Jason Ankeny