Paul Argay's company could have called its new wireless phone service nearly anything. But the marketing vice president said American Personal Communications Corp. in Bethesda never really considered calling it "APC Spectrum."
"Having Candice Bergen in our TV advertising, and the diamond Sprint logo, helped people understand we're a well-respected company," said Argay, whose firm's Sprint Spectrum service signed up 100,000 customers in Baltimore and Washington in its first seven months. "If we launched this and called it American Personal Communications Spectrum, people might not be as willing to jump in as quickly."
Stories like Sprint Spectrum's are driving almost everything happening in the telephone business right now, where industries once separated by regulation and technology are converging. But as giants like AT&T, MCI, Sprint and local phone and cable TV monopolies prepare to rush into each other's industries, they are confronting a discomfiting fact.
Phone service is basically phone service.
"We're into a world of commodity services," said Gary Arlen, a Bethesda-based telecommunications consultant. "We're used to commodity products -- it doesn't matter what kind of frozen green beans you buy. Now it doesn't matter what telecom you buy."
Oh, but it does, at least to AT&T and its competitive brethren. Hence the first big -- and intended -- side effect of this year's telecommunications reform law that tore down regulatory walls between local and long-distance phone businesses. With companies that together boast $200 billion-plus in annual U.S. sales facing radical change because of the law, they have to do something to make customers loyal to them.
So they are.
Service bundles
The idea is to take products that even the companies know are practically identical -- and thus susceptible to endless price shopping and carrier-switching -- and tie customers to one company with "bundles" that give discounts if people buy a lot of services in one place.
And companies are backing up the bundles with marketing and customer-service plans designed to cement loyalties to their favorite telephone "brand" before the telecom wars begin in earnest.
A dozen major moves over the past few months hint at what the world of bundling and branding will look like. AT&T introduced its ATT.all package rate for business phone users last month, following MCI's MCI One and networkMCI One plans for consumers and businesses.
