Every so often, we here at Guided Star feel compelled to acknowledge where, in Marketing, extra effort has been put forth, where the practice exceeds the ordinary, where a certain essence has pervaded throughout an organization.

Actually, we give out awards all the time.   Most aren’t given this notoriety.   This one is special, close to a lifetime achievement award.   So, with no further suspense, the envelope please.

And the Award for Bone Headed Marketing goes to . . . . . Verizon.

From the hall here, John, the scene is people shooting to their feet and erupting in a thunderous applause, sustained for an amazing time and punctuated by raucous hoots and screams.   We’ve can’t remember a more intensely deep-seated sentiment, and widely held, at these awards.   This is obviously a very, very popular choice, John.

Okay, we want to dissect this carefully, but let’s start with the background.   We’re here not just to smear Verizon for their Marketing and who they are today, but an important part of this story is, where they came from.   Everyone loves a good rags to riches story, and we just don’t have one here.   One of the “Baby Bells”, Verizon sprang forth from “Ma Bell”, AT&T, in 1984.   In the greatest court-ordered divestiture ever in this nation, the mammoth telephone monopoly was broken up into little Mom-and-Pop monopolies, with assets each only in the tens of billions of dollars.   Monopolies who only in recent months have started seeing any real potential for competition in the local phone business.

The nation, even if perhaps not the experts, but probably them too, would judge the breakup of Ma Bell as worthy of a Bone Headed Award all its own.   You see, we loved Ma Bell.   We loved her even more once she was gone.   Ma Bell was the standard for how Big Business could be run, with everyone but the regulators pretty happy.   Ma Bell set the benchmark for everyone else to be evaluated against in Service Reliability, Product Durability, Customer Service, and Innovation.   I mean, you could kill a charging Moose with a phone and it would still work afterwards.   And Bells Labs was a national treasure even if most people today can’t fathom the technological leap that was moving from a rotary phone to the ubiquitous touch tone keypad.   Excuse us, Generations X and Y while us geezers reminisce, but there was something to that simpler time.   Need help?   You picked up the phone and dialed “0” and it was there, usually in two or three rings.   That may never be seen again.

Yes, yes, yes, long distance calling was expensive and who knows how different the world would have been if the Justice Department had found something else to do in the eighties.   The point is we loved Ma Bell, and, no matter how you felt about the breakup, the Baby Bells started out life with two important gifts.   One, the world’s largest storehouse of Goodwill ever accumulated, and two, a continuing monopoly that guaranteed them not just viability, but robust financial health for decades.

So they started out with our affections, normally something hard won, and our business, because we still didn’t have a choice.   And they have had twenty plus years to think about what they wanted to be when they grew up after their very privileged childhoods.   And this is what they came up with?

Now, before the bashing gets fully underway, let’s note the source of a major part of the leak of that goodwill.   Verizon, like her sisters, saw the cellular phone service business as a natural threat/extension to the business and jumped into it.

Now, we hate cell phone companies.   And not without some reason, but let’s acknowledge that avoiding that fate would have been difficult.   As common as cell phones are worldwide today, it is a technology that has taken a long time and a lot of infrastructure to get to the passable service levels we enjoy today.   Until just the past few years, they were expensive and infrequently had decent reception.   Those of us that have used them for 20 years carry a fairly definitive chip on our shoulders that is hard to get over.

That part, that the technology was unavoidably flawed in early deployment, was no fault of their own.   Their Customer Service though was also flawed, having grown into the wonderfully inflexible bureaucracy that they are today, and just didn’t help.   But clearly, the technology carried a challenge to customer satisfaction from the start.

That is all I’ll give them as excuses.   The rest is a mess of their making.   Now, the Bone Headed Award is meant to reflect a fairly pervasive and thorough approach.   This is not granted for a merely stupid marketing campaign.   We look for a lack of customer focus, a self-involvement, to accompany a blunderously misgiven marketing effort.   This award goes only to those whose words and actions reach the absolute pinnacle of marketing incompetence.

So, let’s start with their marketing campaign.   Yes, every man, woman and child over the age of two know it, as it has been hammered into us with a sustained regularity that is only exceeded by the aggregated works of the auto industry (alien cultures that monitor our transmissions are convinced that humans on planet Earth buy a new car every twelve days).

Yes, I’m speaking, of course, of “Can You Hear Me Now?”

Daft.   Just incredible, not only for its stupidity, but its unrelenting tenure.

You have a product that has an extended history of not doing what it is supposed to do, and you want to ceaselessly remind us of that?   Who hasn’t heard that commercial and mimicked internally, if not screamingly out loud, that refrain with a slight alteration.   Can you hear me Now?   Shriek it at the top of your lungs.   Can you hear me Now?   That’s right, you’ve heard people on the streets drown out street traffic as they speak that slogan.   Can . you . hear . me . . . Now?   Is that supposed to be the marketing mastery behind it all?   That we all say the phrase, even if it is in the moment before we curse them specifically?

I know there are some demented souls that have mysteriously headed the field of advertising psychology that assert that being remembered is what’s important, but having let this motto have a life for so long is enough to have the Verizon executive staff, board and entire marketing department subjected to some mental health screening.

And does anyone love the jacketed nerd that has become the spokesperson for Verizon?   You’re a 71 billion dollar company, number 14 on the Fortune 500 list, and this is the guy that personifies you?   A geeky idiot, oblivious to his surroundings, wandering through, testing his cell reception?

Perhaps it is more an accurate portrayal than any of us care to face.   For Verizon is cluelessly lost, twenty some years and yet to find a soul for itself.   Soulless.   For when you examine the company and its actions closer, it begins to look more and more like it has become the embodiment of the Evil Empire.  

I’ll leave untouched the topic of its corporate insecurity, a paranoia that drives it to borderline anti-competitive actions that maybe ought to have the Justice Department on the beat again.   Suffice it to say that it is unflattering for the entrenched monopoly to act the way it does, and is only further evidence that the boardroom concentration is wrongly off of the customer.   That we will examine, as any of us that are customers can attest to feeling unloved.

Now the institutional indifference Verizon exhibits towards its customers is not unique.   Indeed, it is all the rage amongst the behemoths, and they are all convinced it looks good on them as their keen focus on being bigger behemoths through acquisitions and cost control through downsizings has been rewarding in financial terms.   It continues to work because none has figured out there might be another way, but that day is coming.

Next Page, Institutional Indifference

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