You’ve probably seen or heard stories about food marketers, supposedly scaling down their marketing to children. Great story, except they have a lot of wiggle room about what they plan to market, and how. Packaging is the one place they obviously won’t give up, with boxes of cereal saying more about the characters like Shrek and Spiderman than the contents.

So while the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association is busy debating the topic how to do the minimum and seem like its members are helping the consumer, it’s good to take a look at another story about actually anticipating a target audience’s needs and doing something about it.

Samsung has started installing charging stations for cell-phone and mobile accessory  at Los Angeles International Airport. It sems so simple, that you wonder why carriers like Verizon or T-Mobile hadn’t thought of it before. It’s a great way for a brand to communicate that it understands what its customers (and all potential ones) face when traveling.

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So you’ve been placed on hold (again) and are convinced that customer service has left the building –for Bangalore, perhaps.

But there’s a neat solution taking shape. It’s called NoPhoneTrees.com,
and it could eliminate the phone-tree headache. It’s from a San
Francisco-based company called Bringo. How it works is amazing: You
click on the company you want to call, and enter your phone number and hang up. NoPhoneTrees dials the company,
circumvents their phone tree, and calls you back when you are in queue
for the next customer service rep., shaving off valuable on-hold time.
Perfect for days when you’re multi-tasking, or your minutes are running out.

It’s still in demo mode so it looks like a web site with limited lists of lists. (In insurance, Humana and Geico are listed, but no State Farm). But The company says the full service will launch soon.

I see great potential. I don’t know about you, but I add pauses into
my speed dials so that the technology zips through the phone tree of
frequently called numbers –airlines, credit card companies, even
calling cards, and doctor’s offices. I would like to see how this could
work when I’m driving, and don’t want to tie up the phone while waiting in
the queue to check a flight status. What if the service wold
allow us to set a day and time in advance, so we could get into the
phone queue of the airline, three days down the road just to make sure
the flight’s not delayed?

What’s this to do with marketing communication? Consider
this. It’s a free service to anyone, but as the go-between, it could
easily ask customers to pay back for the service with their attention.
No I don’t mean listen to an ad –through that’s the predictable model
to go after. It could be a 15- second survey of the company you just
spoke to. Surveys are everywhere. You’ve seen companies use register
receipts inviting customers to do a phone survey, redeemable for a gift
card or generous coupon. To use the airline example again, if US Airways
gave you 100 air miles if you answered a 5-question survey at the end
of your phone-tree-avoided call to Flight Reservations, would you say
no? If Kinkos gave offered 10-color copies, or Borders gave you a coupon for a latte for taking a survey?

Customers will trade off  attention for value-added service or
products. Marketers value timely feedback. Someone who allows you to to
put a spike through the heart of the phone tree could create a win-win
situation for both.   

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