I’m filing this in the “me too” advertising section (when I get around to having such a section). So, there’s some US wireless carrier called Alltel which launched this new cool feature that lets you call up to 5 of your friends/family on other networks for free. They call this feature “My Circle,” which is nice and catchy.
And of course, within weeks, you can’t walk through a mall without hearing about T-Mobile’s response, which they’ve cleverly and originally dubbed “My Faves” which allows you to, guess what, call up to 5 of your friends/family on other networks for — you guessed, free.
So here’s a kudos to Alltel for calling out T-Mobile’s “look mommy, I can do what he does” strategy. It’s quite a hilarious response, actually, in that it shows how effortlessly they have the upper hand. My Circle has expanded to 10 of your friends. Just like that. And, their new advertising spots point this out.
Come on, T-Mobile. You guys came to the US a few years ago and took it by storm. You were the first widely known GSM networked wireless provider, you had cool phones, you put hottie Cathy Zeta-Jones in your advertising spots. They were edgy, you were set apart. And you know what? That got me: hook, line and sinker. Verizon was probably a cheaper option, but between the image I had of T-Mobile just being cool, man, and the fact that you offered GSM, Aimee and I signed up to your family plan (with a one year contract).
And I’ll tell you why you’re going to lose us soon. Our phones are fairly outdated, so we’re looking for new phones. For starters, the current line up of phones is somewhat underwhelming. To be honest, I’m not sure if we can even renew our one-year-plan. We’re basically “off-plan” at the moment, which actually suits us fine. However, if we’re to get phones at good deals, we’d have to sign up for a plan. Except, we’d be locked in for two years.
So this gets me thinking. I like GSM, so Sprint/Nextel and Verizon are out. Alltel (see above) is definitely cool but they’re CDMA as well (and they don’t offer any plans in Massachusetts anyway). This leaves us with Cingular. For ten bucks a month more, we get a buttload of extra monthly minutes, with unused ones getting carried over into the next month. Yeah, we lose out on your original MyCircle (couldn’t your marketing flunkies have at least thought up something original, for crying out loud? Did you give them a raise for the blatant copy-catting?). But that’s ok, because most everyone we know is on Cingular, with a small minority on Verizon. And you know something? Cingular just has cooler phones.
That’s just how we’re inclined so far. If OpenMoko does actually get released in the next couple of months I’ll pick one up (maybe two) and that criterion for carrier selection just goes away. Which leaves us with feature comparisons, and I think the minutes-carrying-over plus the lesser amount of dropped calls (this is actually claimed by everyone we know who’s on cingular) will probably win us away.
In short, T-Mobile do a couple of things: get both your marketing and product planning/management departments to pull up their socks and start innovating again. Stop following (or at least don’t be so bloody blatant about it) and start leading (again). We both know you’re capable of it.
Have I ever mentioned that b2evolution sucks? I couldn’t edit the post to fix the names of the features. Only choice was to delete the original post and redo it from scratch. So I’ll be pasting the comments from that post back in here 🙁
Joshua Nichols commented:
I haven’t heard much good about Cingular, at least on the east coast. Coverage seems to be underwhelming in these parts, from what I hear.
Some friends and I were joking about their least drop calls claim, and that you can’t drop a call if you don’t have enough coverage in the first place.
And somewhat relatedly, by using Cingular, you’d be in a good place to get a iphone when they come out, with their exclusive deal and all 🙂
Psuedoray commented:
I work at Alltel and have worked on the My Circle project, My circle has allowed people to call 10 numbers for free right from its inception. Your statement that it was 5 numbers first and then it went on to 10 numbers is incorrect, just wanted to clarify that.
thanks!!
I commented:
Hi Pseudoray,
I’m only talking about what I see on the Alltel TV spots. My memory tells me that it was 5 in the beginning. And this somewhat backed up in the second generation TV spots for it when the Alltel character responds to Chad (the T-Mobile character) smugly saying something T-Mo doing 5 as well. Alltel responds with something like, “you know what would be better? 10” which comes off as saying Alltel used to do 5, but they can just easily keep T-Mo playing catch and so they’re doing 10 now. If it has always allowed 10 for clients, then I’m not aware at all, as that was not advertised from the beginning.
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