Nick Jones

Edwin Land is reputed to have said “marketing is what you do when your product is no good”, and while I might not go that far, I certainly feel that marketing is something you do when your product is undifferentiated. This is an observation, not malice; I’m hardly guilt-free because I used to work for a marketing organisation once. Hey, we all make mistakes.

This musing on marketing has been triggered by some of the latest efforts of the mobile industry. I have a US T-Mobile Android handset in front of me, and it has a T-Mobile Logo, a Motorola logo, but no Android logo. The same is true for Verizon’s new “Droid” handset, it’s obviously a Verizon handset, and it’s made by Motorola, but where does it say “Android”? It doesn’t. Android and Google are mentioned in the small print on the Verizon web site, but you have to get out a magnifying glass to find them.

This looks like a desperate effort at misdirection by operators who’re trying to prevent their customer from discovering an important secret – all the cool stuff comes from Google and Android, not from the network. Most subscribers think voice and data arrives on a mobile by magic. They don’t know how wireless works and care even less. Most don’t care much about operators either, with number portability it’s a lot easier to change your mobile operator than your email or IM address. From a consumer perspective the big issue is that these are ANDROID handsets, not Motorola / Verizon / T-Mobile handsets. Ultimately Android will succeed or fail because of the quality of its app store and ecosystem. The nightmare scenario from the operator’s perspective is that the subscribers will discover that they can get the same cool Android apps by buying their next phone from another network. All this mobile marketing is about deferring the evil day when the customers discover you’re just a bit pipe.

Dubious mobile marketing isn’t restricted to the US; here in the UK Vodafone have a commercial based on social networking of redheads. My daughter is a redhead, and her comment was “just makes me feel really patronised, won’t be buying a phone from them any time soon”.

To be fair, I can see why mobile marketing execs are struggling. They’re selling the same handsets as everyone else, using the same app stores as everyone else, all the content innovation is happening on the internet and in some countries it’s impossible to differentiate the network because they already share it with their biggest competitors.