Today’s guest blog is written by Mindy Jeffries the President of Stealth Marketing. She will be writing a series of blogs that will appear here on Fridays for a while. If you want to contact Mindy you can call her at 314 880-5570. Tell her you saw her here!
In this blog post, my intent is to examine the history of telecommunications marketing so we can all have an appreciation of the work we have today, the products and the marketing solutions in the fast paced environment we find ourselves. From the day I started in 1978 until today, one thing is certain and that is change. So this post will provide solutions and ideas on how to make that change fun and manageable.
Cable started as a technical product that solved a problem for people in places that could not get the new invention called ‘television’. The cable industry solved a need. Today those needs are rarely present with products that telecommunications companies market. So, what started as a technical-needs-based product became more of an everyday consumer product, and a story had to be told in an effective and compelling manner which would help new consumers choose which product fit their needs the best. This is when it got a lot more fun for marketers. But wait, telecom companies had no marketers!
Telecom began to get more competitive and a need emerged to tell the ‘how are we different?’ story in an increasingly compelling way. Competitors came in on the television side, on the phone side, and on the Internet side. All of a sudden, telecom companies had competitors emerging at every door.
In the early days of cable television we told the story through products. HBO, ESPN, and other similar companies would help pay for the marketing. Our competitors started marketing with those same brand names. Cruel. Products became ubiquitous, available through all competitors. Those premium product offerings were no longer a differentiator.
Of course, a few other things happened in the world of marketing in the last 30 years. A truckload of marketing options started to become available to us. The marketing industry was introduced to new technology, new research entities, new methods, new philosophies, etc. In the end, that yielded options, more than one way to skin a cat. More marketing options means more places to spend your money with a lot of variation in response rates to different audiences with different marketing methods. Sophisticated, targeted, analytical marketing became very important.
The problem became: how do we effectively differentiate in a quickly emerging telecom world . . . how do we tell our story, what is the target market, who is the target demo and what is the best way to place that communication? How do we utilize all of these marketing innovations? Those are the questions we will answer over the next few weeks. Hopefully these blogs will explain the process behind the curtain and I hope to show you the processes and strategies behind effective marketing.