Look, the bottom line is we know T-Mobile’s first quarter numbers that dropped earlier this week could have been better. They could have been ALOT better. As Verizon and AT&T pull away from the pack and as Sprint struggles the time is ripe for T-Mobile to make big moves, at least enough with which they can hurdle themselves back into the contest for third place. Sprint is ahead by 14 million customers but struggling with losses on a consistent basis. There is a constant argument in our comments as to whether or not it’s the handsets that T-Mobile falters on or something else. Personally, I don’t think the handsets matter as much as the marketing and the image. Where T-Mobile needs improvement is in name recognition and that’s all marketing. We tend to pass this message along quite frequently and T-Mobile if you are listening and since I know you are please please please do something with the marketing. Bite back against the AT&T’s and the Verizon’s of the world. I’m still sold my Catherine Zeta Jones commercial idea where she is trying to make a call on the iPhone on AT&T, can’t and then walks into a T-Mobile store. A 30 second spot and its awesome, at least I think so. I don’t know the semantics of marketing and I don’t pretend to know them, but I can say that I know what my readers see and hear and that’s something I know A LOT about. I know what the people think and they think its either handsets or marketing. I think it’s definitely the latter over the former.
Do your current customers a favor, do your future customers a favor and work just a little harder to separate yourself from the pack. Arguing over which “G” is more important in the grand scheme of things means very little as it’s a battle you are likely not to win. Customers will see 4G and immediately think its better than 3.5G and that’s just the world we live in. Four is better than 3 and that’s that. What you can do, what you need to do is work more on the message rather than the semantics of what the message entails. Get a good campaign together and the message takes on a world of its own. The magenta faithful are waiting, are you listening?
Image courtesy of FierceWireless