Cingular (now: AT&T) used to advertise the fewest number of dropped calls

When I was on the phone yesterday talking to my sister down in Orange County, she and I started laughing about how many times we have to call each other to complete a conversation. We are both iPhone users now on AT&T (which was Cingular when we started with the first iPhones), who came over from Verizon.

Neither of us ever had a dropped call, ever, when we were on Verizon. Verizon never advertised themselves as "The Network with the Fewest Dropped Calls" -- Cingular did that. But we never knew what a dropped call was until we got onto Cingular/AT&T.

I told my sister that I learned something about marketing that I should have remembered from the days of Lee Iococca and the Chrysler/Dodge/Plymouth Reliant K series cars -- the ones with the 10 year, 100,000 mile warranty! (Yes, the ones that were lucky to last four years and if you got 50,000 miles out of them before they rattled and shook themselves into parts, you were lucky.)

Lee Iococca and his research team learned that fewer than 1/4th of the people who buy a new car will keep the warranty in effect. So they sold against their negative. Cingular/AT&T did the same.

So now, we enjoy the network with the fewest number of dropped calls. (Which we never knew about or appreciated when we were on Verizon but now fully miss as we see the Cingular/AT&T marketing team tearing a page out of Lee Iococca's play book.)

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom

Remember: Burt Bacharach lied. What the world really needs now is an undo button.