In efforts to capture a broad range of consumer users, cellular carriers and equipment providers are stepping up marketing and advertising efforts to include glossy paper and primetime TV.
The advertising boon arises from a climate of intensifying competition among cellular and personal communications service providers trying to cash in on consumers’ increasing awareness, curiosity and demand for wireless services.
Yet the cellular business is faced with hurdles. Carriers and retailers must break through consumers’ resistance when it comes to the number of products, services and options-such as rate plans and enhanced services-that are available, understanding how a product works and the cost of a product or service.
PCS carriers, which promise consumers lower rates, better call quality and cute little phones, present a competitive hurdle for cellular carriers.
Cellular carriers and phone producers are targeting a wide cross section of potential users, city folk and rural dwellers, male and female, black and white, rich and poor, young and old.
In keeping with an efficient advertising strategy, however, any one multimillion dollar campaign likely is targeting only a narrow segment of the market. Recent cellular product and service ads aim to keep their message simple. Companies are selling products on image, rather than touting talktime, network security or battery life.
Some companies identify a specific need or concern, like safety, and assure their product fulfills that need. For instance, middle class working women, ages 18 to 54 with families are a popular target for selling cellular phones on the premise of keeping in touch with the kids. What mom could say no to that?
Nancy Hill of TBWA Chiat/Day Los Angeles, and advertising account director for AirTouch Cellular, said the angle for marketing cellular began as one of a “need,” for businesspeople, as a tool that could help users improve the way they worked. As the market grew, carriers began concentrating on differentiating their wireless services from the other guy. Much of today’s marketing effort has returned to a need premise, as the mobile community has grown to include everyone from homemakers to college students to traveling business people.
“There are people out there that know they need phones,” explained Hill.
But consumers still are resistant to making a purchase, partly because they are overwhelmed with the number of choices available, she added. “Carriers are in a position to place themselves as the answer to that overwhelming feeling.”
Also a challenge for carriers in scoring customers is averting their focus from the hardware-free phones!-to the service that follows. AirTouch’s new advertising campaign aims to make customers feel the quality of AirTouch’s service makes the company’s service an easy choice. The company’s television campaign, which also aims to familiarize customers in U S West NewVector Group Inc. markets with the AirTouch brand name, is dubbed an “Easy Call to Make.”
One spot features actor and musician Rick Boggs, who is blind, shooting basketballs, driving a car, buying lunch and hitting balls in a batting cage.
The Cellexis radio and newspaper ads for prepaid cellular service take a clever approach toward the company’s primary market-people with poor credit or no credit. Cellexis’ ads feature characters in their late teens, in particular a guy who says “dude” a lot, who are trying to sell to other young adults. The often embarrassing issue of credit is never mentioned. The campaign message is: You, too, can get a cell phone and be cool for a very low price!
Motorola Inc. recently introduced a print and radio campaign for cellular phones and pagers that targets African-American professional adults between the ages of 21 and 54, specifically those people living in the city with families.
Empowerment is the campaign’s theme, said Motorola. “More Power to You” states one print ad, which features a headshot of a professionally dressed African-American woman in her late twenties or early thirties. The copy’s message is simple: Motorola pagers and cellular phones mean peace of mind because they allow you to be in constant touch.
The company’s print ads are running in national magazines with primarily African-American readership and two spots are airing on the radio.
360degree Communications Inc., formerly Sprint Cellular, is launching an introductory brand awareness campaign on TV, radio and in print media in markets the company is acquiring from Independent Cellular Network. A comprehensive corporate branding campaign will follow.
