There are savvy consultants Out There who rake in lots of money helping brand marketers develop their message.  A lot of the primary research that goes into such activities is warranted and valuable.  But that doesn’t make it science.  That doesn’t mean it works.  It can be hit or miss.

Not so very long ago, we served a client in the mobile phone market who had a very definite image problem.  The master brand was known for being cutting-edge, cool, and fun.  But the company we served specialized in pre-paid cellphones … which were decidedly not cool.  In Europe, pre-paid mobiles were common, but here in the U.S., they were the province of drug dealers and cheatin’ hubbies.

Most brands in this position will spend gobs of money on research, messaging, etc. and come to market with a carefully-tuned, top-down message exquisitely designed for mass appeal.  Focus groups are often called in.  Logos are re-designed.  And all that can work.  But in the era of Social Media, in which your customers are talking constantly, publicly, about the issues and trends that affect them, why not just listen really, really closely, and develop a messaging strategy based on what’s already stirring in the grassroots?

That was the tack we took while working with this mobile carrier.  Rather than try to combat the negatives, we listened to what people were talking about, across a range of social outposts.

Beyond the customary chatter about the latest-and-greatest smartphones, consumers were talking about losing their jobs in the Recession and sweating about onerous cellphone contracts.  They were talking about the pros/cons of buying cellphones for their ‘tweenage children.  They were talking about weird phone-stalking exploits by ex-boyfriend/girlfriends.

Examine the marketing messages of the major mobile companies.  What do they talk about?  Network speed.  Cool phones.  Pricing plans.  That’s about it.  Now compare it to what we discovered people were actually talking about, in the context of their cellphones.  They were talking about human issues, not technology issues.  Given that we needed to be scrappy to make a dent in this noisy market, we eschewed the proactive “cool phone at a great price” messages (and the defensive “not just for drug dealers” line) and favored funkier, more humanistic messages…

We gained mainstream feature coverage in journals like Family Circle, discussing the countervailing issues of safety and “spoiling” when considering a cellphone purchase for a 12–year old.  The tween wants an iPhone — but you think it’s too expensive, and, you don’t want to spoil them — then again, you also see the benefits of being able to reach them anytime, especially in an emergency.  How about a cool but low-cost pre-paid mobile, so you can control costs but reap the benefits of hipness and safety?

On the other side of the spectrum, we partnered with the authors of a new book on Flirtexting to discuss how tech usage impacts your love life … and how it would be safer to “flirtext” with a low-cost, pre-paid mobile phone to protect yourself against someone who takes things too seriously.  Why not have a phone # just for dating, when the cost is low and the risks are high?  Result: major morning-show broadcast coverage.

Such messages were built from the ground-up.  There was no need to address the “pimps and cheaters” theme that we thought surrounded the pre-paid cellphone market, once we figured out that the most likely buyers of these products were likely to be 20– and 40–something women with legitimate reasons to make such a purchase.  Both of these “buyer personas” had great reasons for wanting a low-cost, no-strings, cool-looking phone.  But network speeds, bustling app stores, 3–year plans?  Not relevant to their lives.

As a result of this approach, within a year the client received 65 million impressions in print media, 450 million online media impressions, and 14 million broadcast media impressions.  On the social side, we saw a 2,100% increase in Facebook Fans and a 1,200% increase in Twitter followers.  Ultimately they were acquired for ungodly sums.

Hard to believe this company came to us complaining of an “image problem.”  All they really had was a listening problem.  Honestly, it’s simple stuff, this “listening,” yet too often its effectiveness is lost in the rush to spend money on focus groups and pretty charts.

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