Sprint Nextel Corp. has put a positive spin on its Sept. 1 merger with Nextel in a premium-driven campaign targeting current business-to-business customers.
Sprint orchestrated a series of mailings to reassure its business customers that the merger wouldn’t compromise Sprint service— would, in fact, give customers more options and a broader service base.
The B2B effort is part of Sprint’s aggressive marketing campaign for the combined company. Consumer advertising (TV, print, outdoor, online) broke Sept. 1 via Chiat/Day, San Francisco, and Sprint rebranded its 1,600 company-owned retail stores overnight. Sprint plans to juice its sponsorship portfolio (including the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series and the NFL) and run a slate of consumer and B2B promotions, such as free high-speed wireless laptop connection cards, trial programs on wireless email and discounts for large-volume purchases of Nextel network handsets and PCS smart devices.
But first, Sprint had to reassure current customers that service wouldn’t change. So, Sprint mailed a series of innovative premiums to 1,038,000 business-to-business customers from late August through mid-September. All pieces adopted Sprint’s new tagline, “Yes you can,” and its signature bright yellow color.
“People don’t remember getting a letter. Our mandate needs to be something memorable— to make customers feel powerful, and energized about what the merger offers them,” said Jonathan Butts, executive creative director of Publicis Dialog San Francisco, the agency which handled the B2B campaign for Sprint.
First up was a poster that unfolded to reveal questions (all answered by the phrase—, you know); 760,000 were mailed to customers just as the consumer print ads broke.
Next, Sprint sent out 230,000 T-shirts shrink-wrapped in the shape of a telephone. Most were mailed; 18,000 were hand-delivered by Sprint sales reps.
Sales reps also distributed 6,000 packages, each with four CD samplers of mood music designed to relax B2B customers. “It was a simple gift to get sales reps in the door and say thanks for staying with Sprint,” Butts said.
Then came the coup de grace. Sprint cut a deal with beverage maker Rockstar, Inc. to produce special four-packs of Rockstar energy drink in Sprint-branded boxes. Publicis Dialog produced 42,000 special packs on a tight six-week deadline.
Signing Rockstar was “a major coup,” Butts said. “They had been approached in the past for co-branding campaigns, but they never did a deal. We were the first ones to achieve this.”
Rockstar even agreed to stop its production line to let Publicis Dialog put Sprint’s design on-press. That saved the agency from having to hand-assemble the packages in a separate location— important savings in time and money. Sales reps hand-delivered 10,000 cases; the other 32,000 were mailed to B2B customers.
How have customers responded? That’s hard to know, since it’s a branding message and not a typical response-driven direct-mail effort, Butts said. Still, Sprint will track feedback and use that data as it sets its B2B marketing strategy for the future.
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