Dear Cell Phone companies. Here's an idea: market to your own customers.

It's commonly accepted knowledge that customer retention cost is cheaper than customer acquisition cost. Getting a new customer requires commercials, rebates, discounts, and time which are all very costly. So why not spend some of the money and advertise to your own customer?

I got this idea from VW when they started pushing the Jetta Report where they compared Jetta drivers to everyone else. While the commercial wasn't entirely targeted at current owners, many owners are probably happy knowing that they are in a group of people that do cool things.
The cell phone industry is starting to resemble the automotive industry with its extremely high market penetration rate (who doesn't own a cell phone? car?) resulting in companies trying to steal customers away from each other rather than developing a new customer base. This sucks for the consumer because the companies are playing a cat-and-mouse game with your money (going to advertisement) which in the end is a zero-sum game.

Sprint might have had a slight chance of retaining me as a customer if they automatically upgraded my account to include the fair-and-flexible which they are marketing heavily. Instead, they only allow me to add the feature with another 2 year contract, which I’m not signing. If Sprint introduced fair-and-flexible and announced that they are applying it to all existing accounts, they would have a much higher retention rate, not to mention the respect from current and potential customers. But no, they'd rather destroy me with their unfair-and-inflexible $.40/min overage.

Keep your customers happy. Drug dealers do it, you can too.

Labels: cell phone, marketing