PhoneGnome participatory marketing challenge
The chart below provides a visual representation of PhoneGnome from a benefits and “selling proposition” perspective.
Across the bottom are shown four primary configurations of PhoneGnome service, split between US and International (non-US in our case) and customers using the PhoneGnome-box (add-on device), shown in blue, and those using the service without the PhoneGnome-box hardware.
Within each configuration are the listed benefits to the user corresponding with that configuration.
At the top of the chart is the flowchart decision tree that arrives at one of the possible configurations.
I think from this chart, it make it pretty obvious why PhoneGnome is really hard to message and explain to new customers. First, the four configurations have different value stories. Second, even within a single configuration different customer segments will prioritize and value the benefits differently.
The two blue boxes, labeled “Full Impact” and “High Impact” represent “PhoneGnome 1.0″ – the initial 2005 focus of PhoneGnome, users connecting the box to their fixed-line (home) telephone service to obtain new benefits. Our early research broke these users into three main groups: Traditionalists, Globalists, and Gurus.
Traditionalists value plug-and-play simplicity, safety of real 911, and mostly care about the benefits of cheap calling and telemarketer screening. Globalists have high usage and enjoy the benefit of free and cheap calling, along with voicemail. Gurus are more tech. savvy and value cheap calling, voicemail, telemarketer screening, and other features (softphone, online call logs, etc.)
In late 2006, we introduced “PhoneGnome 2.0″ and the option to use PhoneGnome service without the PhoneGnome add-on device (no hardware). This added the other two configuration options shown on the chart. This expanded the addressable market, but made describing PhoneGnome even more complicated.
From the chart below, it’s no wonder that it’s difficult to boil PhoneGnome down to a single simple sentence – and that’s a recipe for disaster in terms of marketing.
So what would you do? Let us know in the comments below.
December 3rd, 2009 at 2:03 pm
[...] http://www.phonegnome.com/blog/2009/12/02/phonegnome-participatory-marketing-challenge/ [...]
December 3rd, 2009 at 5:50 pm
I want to mull this over a bit so I can offer some useful thoughts David. I bookmarked and saved it and I want to consider it more from the elevator pitch, marketing message perspective.
December 5th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Hi David,
I’m guessing you have probably already proposed and rejected all of these ideas, but I have the inspiration to offer them today anyway. YMMV. I’m sorry if these sound didactic. I’m just throwing out ideas.
I don’t pretend to understand the acronyms and telephone industry nomenclature, but I did come up with this:
“PhoneGnome, It’s YOUR phone on Steroids!”
Hehe. Maybe Steroids is not too wise, given the associations. It’s positioning to something that is known to “add strength” to an existing thing. For instance, not “YOUR phone on antibiotics”. Real bad association. Likewise “meth”.
For most customers, PhoneGnome would be value added. So position against something that is well known for adding value.
But I guess the major idea is this: Given the multiplicity of customer segments, you are right, hard to market. So to the guru, it’s a game changer, a Solution looking for a Problem. Ask them what they see as a icon of that. Einstein. Position against that: “It’s The Einstein of phone services. Probably too obvious and lame, but you get the idea. And so on for each identified customer segment.
The built in positioning of PhoneGnome is that it is Gnomelike. A Gnome can add value if it’s a friendly Gnome. But if not friendly? Do you have to appease it somehow? I think you have to re-position in order to sell it broadly.
So you have to position it for each customer segment as something immediately recognized as desirable and friendly. That holds their interest long enough for you to make your case for that segment. Making your case is addressed specifically to that market segment.
Or, if the market segment really really is into zombies, then something with a favorable connection, like, say, “Stop the zombie telemarketers, load your phone with double-ought call blocking! Get PhoneGnome”. Not really friendly, but definitely value-added.
Then the case you make has to be backed up by user-friendly configuration oriented to that market segment. Or user-friendly enough that it can be used by all potential users.
So, all this is probably really, really stupid and hashed over long ago. It’s saturday morning and I’m avoiding studying for finals. Hope you are doing well.
Michael
December 7th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Thanks for the comments, Michael.
I look forward to hearing from you, Ken.
One of the big problems is PhoneGnome is really four products, or two products in two flavors. First there is the case with the PhoneGnome device (hardware) and then the case without the hardware device. Then for each of these, there’s the case of U.S. and non-U.S. where the benefits and possibilities are slightly different.
And of course the realitythe options are even more complicated than that, when you throw in mobile convergence, where the same person is using two (or more) flavors at the same time etc. E.g. to get consolidated voicemail – one voicemail box for both home/office and mobile.
What’s depicted in the graph is not target-segments per se, but really the possible benefits with a given usage scenario – a two by two matrix of box/non-box and US/non-US. Each scenario imposes constraints on the possible benefit/feature suite. The resulting possible features/benefits of these four ways of using PhoneGnome are depicted in the boxes at the bottom of the chart.
This is the hard part: you’ve got four slightly different products, with different benefits, due to the limitations of whether you’re using the service with the box and whether you’re using from the US/Canada or outside the US/Canada.
It’s very hard to talk about say case-two and not dilute or confuse the message talking about case-one.
Regarding your comments to this, Michael, do we position it as four unique products (that possibly work together) or try to keep it all under one umbrella?
When you’re talking about targeting for a customer segment, one challenge is deciding what it is and what it isn’t. With the current “your phone is broken” messaging theme on the website, we’re only speaking to uses cases with the box and of course primarily the US/Canada case. We have (temporarily at least) abandoned the use cases without the box. We want to re-introduce these other use cases, possibly as a paid service, but it’s a challenge to do so without making the messaging confusing.
One of the on-going challenges with PhoneGnome in terms of speaking to fewer features is that it’s easier to push only a specific feature, but the market of people willing to pay $100 for just one of the features is small. Pick any SINGLE feature/benefit from the boxes in the chart and see which is the biggest market at price X. On the other hand, a long list of features (to justify the $100 price) makes the product seem overly complicated and confusing – when, in fact, PhoneGnome is one of the simplest products on the market. We had early success with the simple message “buy two, call each other free – no computer needed” – it appealed to mostly International calling in areas where people talk a lot, have broadband, but don’t want to make PC calls – but that market is small overall.
December 13th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Hi David,
So, I’ve been thinking about this. Thanks for taking my comments as not being completely lame.
The thing that keeps coming up for me is that marketing does not equal sales. By this I mean that except for the simplest of products that immediately telegraph their benefits, you cannot make sales simply with a marketing plan.
An example that you give is the “buy two, call each other free”. Now that is simple enough that people with that need completely understand it well enough to haul out their wallet. They will call you and pay. You simply have to make those people aware of it’s existence. That would be a short commercial or print add. But show it, don’t say it. Or worse, list it.
But for others, PhoneGnome is hard to explain when one or the other benefit is not paramount or easily seen. You almost have to have an extended conversation with the potential customer to define where their benefit will be to sell them that benefit. I.E., “sales”.
What I suspect is that for most products or services, marketing opens the door to sales. You get them interested with marketing and close the deal with sales.
I think marketing creates an emotional response. It is not, at least in the sound bite, single page ad, 15 second spot world, designed to educate about multiple features and benefits and appeal to rational cost/benefit analysis.
The smiling faces of happy customers, the sleek design, positioning to something already known, generate emotional responses of “I’d like to be that happy”, “that’s cool”, “that’s familiar”. Apple for instance is all about customer experience and it starts with how cool the design is. A person enjoys the cool design, and the lust his friends have when he shows them his/her new toy.
You want your marketing to create enough positive emotional response and “want” to have them give your salesperson a call.
I think you do this with the “your phone’s broken”. You are tapping into an emotional response for those that are unhappy with their phone or frustrated with not getting the functionality they want. But I also think, for those who are not quite aware their phone is broken that it communicates an undercurrent of “you are lame, you are paying for a broken phone.” And then you don’t sell them a new phone, you sell them something to unbreak their phone that they still have to pay for. I’m not sure that is wholly what you want to get across.
I think, in answer to your question of it being 4 products or one, that it is instead a Service, embodied in hardware or software. The function of the service varies according to the hardware or software or both the customer opts for. Different aspects of the service will be most desired to different user segments. I think the term I am familiar with is “publics”. Different public get different ads. The adult magazine gets different ads than “O”, than “Fortune”. Partly in the way you attract attention, but mostly because they probably won’t have the same benefits at the top of their list.
I think the function of the infomercial is to combine sales with marketing. The loud bombastic over the top delivery creates the emotional response and the (admittedly staged and possibly misleading) demonstration does the education.
Then, you just have to have order takers. They have seen enough examples to know how it would benefit and are sold. That is the genius of infomercial.
Isn’t that just abhorrent for geeks like us? Don’t we just cringe at the video professor infomercial? Etc? Yet I think there is a middle ground. There ought to be a way to create that initial, “I could use that”, “I want to know more” response and then educate without feeling like we’ve sold our soul to ShamWOW.
So, positioning is the fast, blink of the eye way to get that emotional response and get them to call sales. You are informing them they can “put your phone on steroids! Call XXX-XXX-XXXX! Their phone experience could be better.
Somewhat longer is showing happy people using PhoneGnome to supersize their existing phone. “I can do so much more with my phone thanks to PhoneGnome!”
“PhoneGnome, the natural telephone enhancement!” Well, maybe not. Or, “I talk to my grandmom in Columbia everyday thanks to my PhoneGnome!” When people see examples of it in use, with happy results, they want that too. They call. You then sell them the particular configuration of hardware/software that will make them happy.
Except for the simplest most instantly demonstrable improvements, you will have to have at least some cadre of sales people that can answer questions, explain options and close the sale. There are people that specialize in that stuff, I think. I’m not a salesman.
If you do an infomercial, then you have much more time to demonstrate with happy people using the 10 most used and valued features. Figure out how to show the benefits with some drama. The best would be the testimonial of happy customers who use some specific aspect of the service all the time, how it improved their lives and was something they couldn’t get with vanilla phone service. Showing several features reaches more “publics”. But, then the question, are your potential users ones who will sit through an infomercial?
You understand the benefits. You probably have statistics on what the most used and valued features of the service are from your existing base. You have surveyed your customers. What TV do they watch? What magazines do they read? Those are the places to put ads that “position” those benefits of PhoneGnome. And dry as geeks are, they still get interested with pictures and other humans smiling using something. Lists of features come second. I think Hulu might be great to put ads on. People are already using it to catch up on their shows, (I do) and that is right center on tech savy comfortable with computer types. I think consolidating voicemail from multiple lines is a killer app. So showing that experience as opposed to say, missing a some important info because it came in on a voicemail that doesn’t get checked often.
So, in my view, PhoneGnome is a Service, it’s a phone enhancement. As an umbrella campaign, Position against something well known as an enhancement. “It’s A-1 sauce for your phone!”) The various ways it enhances are subjects for individual ads to individual publics within your campaign. Pick your most easily communicated benefit/broadest public for your first ads. Put them where those people get their information/entertainment. Marketing is to generate the emotional response of interest and wanting that enhancement. Sales is education and the close.
I hope this makes some kind of sense. I am not a professional. I just have ideas and sometimes I think they are worth saying. Sometimes I am really wrong about that.
Hope the weather is good there. Finally warmed up here.
Michael
December 14th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Michael, you’re spot-on with the marketing/sales and tactical approaches. For the moment, it’s putting the cart before the horse a little bit, or iow, we’re resetting back to a more base issue of messaging, particularly related to the website with the goal of sales (as opposed to branding and awareness).
In the website context, one issue is you only have a few seconds to say something to the visitor – infomercial style education and selling is not effective in the website context (with some specific product type exceptions). You may find the following post interesting: http://mrblog.org/2008/12/18/the-ugly-truth-about-pretty-websites/
We’ve done some infomercial tests and PhoneGnome is a product that works well in that medium, using many of the exact approaches that you outline in your comment. the practical problem for us is we don’t have the resources to do it at scale.
Here’s a little more background on how we arrived at this “broken” theme on the http://www.phonegnome.com website.
Our research shows that people (on the Internet at least), are most interested in the following things (in this order):
1) free calls – but not the kind we’re willing to offer, so we don’t talk about it too much anymore
2) softphone – for remote access to their service, often cable phone, or some other device-based VoIP that doesn’t offer softphone or open SIP credentials
3) cheap calls to “regular phones”
4) SIP address
5) SIP/VoIP calls (the kind of free calls that we DO offer)
6) Mobile “something” (I expected this to be higher)
7) Call screening (distant to the above)
Note that, while Voicemail is a feature a good sized segment of people clearly like, it doesn’t seem to be a driver for purchase on the front end. It’s kind of weird. It’s a benefit many users like after the fact, but it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the purchase decision. We’ve tried a lot of different ways and it has never had much effect.
The “broken” theme was developed to speak to the above and is so far showing a 400% increase in PhoneGnome sales. However, it has also created a problem. Since this content focuses exclusively on buying the box and the benefits of having the box, we have a problem trying to re-introduce the “non-box” accounts as a paid option – say to get an account on your mobile phone- without diluting the “buy the box” message.
Appreciate any help or thoughts.
December 14th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
Hi David,
Thanks for the additional info.
So here is my understanding of the flow that should occur, given that you don’t have big budgets for the “regular campaign”
{something} >(sales=[ http://www.phonegnome.com >[education on features]) > paypal order(or other)
so {something} has to illustrate one or more benefits of phonegnome only well enough to produce the emotional reaction that results in a potential customer hitting http://www.phonegnome.com.
So, what if you did {something} like this: A kind of fanciful viral video style very short youtube scenario. something funny, quirky, even just stupid. but while being that, gets across showing how someone USES one or a couple of PhoneGnome features. at the end, “PhoneGnome. Can YOUR phone do that?
Even if it doesn’t “take off” you have invested not much, (unless you got spielberg to direct). So you try it again.
in the meantime you develop the skill of clearly showing/illustrating the benefits of phonegnome so you can make very short videos, (not one long video) that goes on the website to directly educate about each feature.
After reading this article, I realize the strategy would be more complex:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/22/the-secret-strategies-behind-many-viral-videos/
Maybe your initial videos don’t directly link to PhoneGnome. But associated links do, or other ways to direct interest and ultimately visits to http://www.PhoneGnome.com.
But it goes to what I’m thinking. What do you think? I saw your PhoneGnome installation video on youtube.
Michael
December 16th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Hi Michael,
Right now, the current efforts are geared toward what to say once the user is at http://www.PhoneGnome.com, what’s the message we want to give to call them to action. We’ve already got a pretty good flow of users to the site – or at least that’s not the focus of this little dilemma – right now we want to tune the message to simplify, to “convert” those coming to the site already into buyers. And specifically one current problem is that the new “broken theme” site, which has improved PhoneGnome box sales so far, now makes it really hard to re-introduce non-box accounts (use cases without the PhoneGnome device) such as for pure mobile/softphone use, without diluting the current content that only talks about the scenario and features/benefits that apply when one has the device.
December 17th, 2009 at 10:22 am
Hi David,
Sorry I didn’t get exactly what you were driving at earlier. So, I’ll be thinking about this over my vacation and let you know what I come up with. Merry Christmas.