Advertising Age yesterday posted a video in which Verizon CMO John Stratton discusses the “Map War” it is conducting with rival service provider AT&T.

In the video, Stratton states that the cellular service provider market has cycled back to a focus on network reliability, rather than available phone choices, as the primary differentiator among service providers. Of course, as AdAge points out, Verizon has hung its marketing hat on network reliabilty ever since it introduced us to the “Can you hear me now?” guy.

I don’t know whether Stratton is correct that customers will focus more on network reliability than phone products. He admitted that the introduction of the Apple iPhone disrupted marketing when tens of thousands of customers drooled over the iPhone and had no problem going with AT&T, which had an exclusive distribution agreement.

I experienced something similar today at work, when I overheard a coworker talking about his new Motorola Droid, which he purchased through a Verizon “buy one, get one free” promotion. I asked him if he was happy with Verizon, and he said, “Oh yeah, the coverage is great.” But he really wanted to show us the cool features of the Droid.

Back around 1990, when I was working in the public relations department at Cellular One in Schaumburg, Ill., network reliability and reach were the primary marketing angles used by us and our primary competitor, Ameritech. At Cellular One, we ran story after story about the most recent cell towers that we built, and how that would improve coverage and reliability. We couldn’t keep our coverage maps as current as we would have liked, because new cell towers were being introduced at a fairly rapid pace.

But that began to change for two main reasons:

• Local communities became disenchanted with the many cell towers dotting their landscapes, and were less inclined to approve new towers, and
• Reception with existing towers was average-to-good over the majority of Cellular One's "coverage area."

But all of the talk of coverage and network reliability ignores a basic fact that continues to be ignored by the media and service providers:

After you achieve a base level of network coverage, the experience of a particular customer depends far more on that customer's travel and cellphone usage patterns than the company that provides the cellular service.

For all of the advertisements that we see and hear that are focused on the benefits of a 3G or 4G network, the fact remains that the root of any cellular service is the transmission of data through the air. Those transmissions can be limited or blocked by natural and man-made obstacles including trees, hills, bridges, and buildings.

No cellular provider has the resources needed to blanket every city or state with unbroken cellular service. So–with the exception of occasional service outages that might occur at a particular cell tower–a customer’s impression of a network’s reliability will depend upon how many “dead spots” exist for that customer as he or she travels. That experience will be different for every customer.

That’s why I chose AT&T as my service provider. I talked with many people who live and work in the same general geographic area as me. I heard their experiences with AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and others. In my case, AT&T was considered to be more reliable by most people with whom I talked, and, in fact, I have been very satisfied with its service. Yet at the IABC World Conference in San Francisco last June, I spoke with Shel Holtz, ABC, who was looking forward to getting a new Palm Pre through Sprint. He had several unsatisfactory experiences with AT&T before he “abandoned” AT&T several years prior to writing the review of the Palm Pre on his blog.

It may not be wise for all cellular service providers to put all of their marketing chips into one basket, whether it be network reliability, new products, price or something else. Find what resonates and stick with it, as long as you can support any claims that you make. I get a sense that neither Verizon nor AT&T have been able to make an airtight case in the “Map Wars” battles.

Let me know what you think. Call me, if you have enough bars.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 5:44 pm and is filed under IABC, communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.