Friday, August 24, 2007

View from a Marketer: Bravo Apple!

So you've probably heard about some of the massive iPhone bills received by AT&T customers. To summarize, some iPhone users recieved detailed logs of every bit of phone usage in their first bills, delivered this week. Every phone call, every web download, every, well I don't even know because I don't own one, but every little itty bitty thing got recorded and sent to customers... some bills even sent in boxes. Quite an embarrassment, eh?

Well, let's think "different" here. This happens to be, in my mind, a smart, well-calculated move by AT&T and Apple... assuming it was even planned in the first place. Think about it. Apple and AT&T just got invaluable free publicity about the incredible usage of the popular phone on the only service that it can operate on. Now, if AT&T can fix the billing "glitch" for the next round of bills, all of the "problems" will be forgotten, but the publicity will hang around for some time.

Now if only I could have that marketing conundrum of how to deal with people using my services too much...

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