ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

I’m the proud owner of a new phone from Nokia, a 6682, the upshot being it’s got a 1.2 megapixel camera, that when combined flickr’s super cool ‘post via email feature‘ I could really be getting into some hefty data transfer on my cell phone service. Which leads me to the task of shopping for data services from my carrier. (on a side note Seth has posted recently that people generally don’t “hate” their phones, they “hate” their carriers)

Now it’s clear to me that a significant amount of marketing dollars has been spent on marketing the various data services that the cell phone companies have, ‘mMode’, ‘MEdiaNet’, ‘TZones’, and ‘picture messaging’. So they’ve coined a new brand name, and spent money on making people aware of that brand name and trying to differentiate themselves from the competition. I mean, surely MEdiaNet is somehow different from TZones…. not.

The major flaw in this marketing strategy ie. investing in advertising, awareness, branding and differentiation, is that data services are extremely novel and not well understood by the customers so awareness and differentiation is actually a bad thing for the customers. I mean when ATT says mMode unlimited for 24.99 and Cingular says MEdiaNet unlimited for 19.99 (believe it or not Cingular also sells Data Connect unlimited for 39.99,. WTF) it is really confusing.

I think TMobile might have got the hint though, on their web site they sell “The T-Mobile Internet Unlimited plan” for 29.99. Now doesn’t that make more sense.

Wouldn’t it be better for customers if all the companies stop trying to differentiate services that customers are having trouble adopting?

How about this:
Cingular Unlimited Internet Plan: 19.99
ATT Unlimited Internet Plan: 24.99
T-Mobile Internet Unlimited plan: 29.99

This is a great example of ’service companies’ using FMCG (fast moving consumer good) branding methods to brand complex services. Luckily for the cell phone companies, they are all using FMCG branding methods so they are all equally as bad at manageing the entire customer experience.

(I know ATT is owned by Cingular now, in fact that’s why this post is part 1, because it is a far longer and more painful story if you’re an ATT customer…)