Vitaly Demin Senior Strategy Consultant Read about Vitaly

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February 2011

If you look back about a year and a half and watch some of the TV ads that Verizon Wireless has had during this period of time, it’s impossible not to see that their brand has been steadily moving into a "robotic space future" (if you will) positioning. It started with Blackberry Storm II and Motorola Droid and then it just never stopped. Over a year later Verizon is still making their ads in the same way. They even managed to present the iPhone 4 in a similar fashion. While there was nothing really "robotic" in this iPhone ad, the “Star Wars and Terminator-like” music still gave you this "future outer space robot" feel.

Here are the links to Verizon Blackberry Storm, Verizon Droid, Verizon 4G LTE, Verizon iPhone, and Verizon Motorola Xoom ads just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

That said, the question is: “Is the Verizon Wireless brand losing human touch?”

Branding is all about what people picture in their minds when thinking of your brand. Every time Verizon gets mentioned, I picture this red eye, robots, stars in the dark sky, lightning rods and so on. Try it yourself. Think of Verizon and see what the first thing is that comes to your mind. As much as I don’t like AT&T for their network quality and customer service (unfortunately, I'm one of those miserable AT&T iPhone customers), they are doing a much better job on staying close to people. They do lifestyle commercials which are very easy to process and connect with (this one, for example). Sprint and T-Mobile also do a good job on staying “down to Earth” and connecting with customers on the “people” level. Verizon instead is moving into this “robotic” space and I’m not sure how they see a long-term emotional connection with consumers through such brand positioning. The only people they can connect with are high school and college kids who like all these Star Wars and video games themes but obviously that’s not enough for a major mobile carrier. It seems that some decision maker in the marketing department of Verizon is a big fan of all these things and just can’t stop pushing the brand in this direction.

The long-term consequences can come at a high price for Verizon. Once consumers instill this “robotic” perception of the Verizon brand into their minds, it will take a long time and a lot of marketing dollars to change it. I might be wrong. I mean, who am I to criticize marketing strategy decisions of a hundred billion dollar company? Speaking of numbers, between 2009 and 2010, Verizon’s revenue went down 1% while the net income shrunk by almost a half (Google Finance). I’m not claiming there’s a direct connection between these two things but this recent branding strategy that appeared around the middle of 2009 most likely has something to do with that.

It's really up to Verizon where they want their brand to be. So far it seems that they rule the outer space, not the air.

Read also:

• Three strategies that can give Nokia and Microsoft a chance

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Free on iBooks

This eBook is a brief insight into the core of the executive management of Sony Corporation, the core that is unfortunately filled with one of the most perilous human qualities – arrogance.

For a very long time now Sony has been known as an organization permeated by arrogant attitude toward their suppliers, their distributors and now their customers. This culture is felt everywhere in the world. I remember having meetings with Sony people in Moscow Russia when I consulted the largest electronics retailer in the country. These meetings were very adversarial and not a most pleasant experience. Also, as I worked with electronics retailers in Kuwait, Emirates, India, England, US and other countries, the opinions I received about Sony were the same. Nobody liked them and nobody wanted to do business with them because it was just too painful. Obviously, they could not stop carrying Sony products in their stores but some of them did try to reduce the assortment. Sony rarely partners. They dictate.

This work is an attempt to show how corporate arrogance affected the decisions Sony made along the way, the decisions that led to mistakes, mistakes that got them dethroned from the position of being the best and the most admired consumer electronics company in the world.

I hope this eBook helps other companies see a bigger picture of how decisions that are made inside their organizations affect their brand, their customer loyalty and profitable business growth. Very often top managers do not realize that many of wrong decisions are made not due to the lack of knowledge about the problem but due to the mentioned above human flaw – arrogance.

The 2nd edition includes financial updates from 2010 as well as other recent events associated with the Sony organization.

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