As the face of today’s entrepreneur trends more towards those twenty-somethings starting companies (instead of mailing out resumes), the battle for this potential-rich demographic is changing the way some voice companies go-to-market. Features, functions and pricing remain important competitive differentiators, but recent branding efforts and the increased hip-factor of some have pushed others to follow suit.
In the platform space, for instance, Twilio set a high bar last year by leveraging social media to the tilt, and in turn built itself a true community. Not to be denied, we’ve since witnessed Voxeo’s Tropo quickly up its own be-cool efforts, and Ifbyphone march out to Seattle to get itself a slice of hip by acquiring Cloudvox.
In the more traditional voice services market – which trust me no one ever accused of being cool – players are also getting a game-face on. Last year Virtual PBX leader GotVMail became Grasshopper, and now attracts hipsters from everywhere with their ‘entrepreneurs’ rock’ message and their Labs effort. And just this week, Bandwidth.com continued it impressive progression from its namesake – essentially providing bandwidth – to a diversified, and apparently cool, company.
PhoneBooth (whose parent is Bandwidth.com) launched two new iPhone apps – Holdr and Conference Starter. While the apps are promoted as ones that will save time and frustration, in disguise they’ll serve as creative ways to build brand awareness and equity – even if they’re not perfect.
On the surface, both apps have attractive value propositions: Holdr allows you to put call centers on hold, when they do it to you. And Conference Starter lets you click, drag and automatically out-call conference call participants, so they don’t need pins or dial-in numbers. Notwithstanding the potential flaws – contact center agents may hang up before you get reconnected, and out-dial conferencing remains one of those features that sounds better in theory than it plays out in practice – I’m betting that investing in these apps will pay dividends.
You see companies like Bandwidth can only make their core, revenue-generating services so ‘cool’. So building wrap-arounds like these is an alternate way to tell its potential customers about their culture and their brand at-large – and of course to draw them in.
So cool is, well, cool in voice these days. As always, competition breeds innovation; in this case, it just happens to be coming from the Marketing department.
Blogger’s note: In preparing this post, I stumbled on the blog of the actual developer of the PhoneBooth apps and read his story. This post of his speaks nicely, from developer perspective, to the rich intersection of VoIP and mobile that lies ahead.
Good post. Trendiness is always an interesting gamble. It can get you noticed and branding certainly can be monetized. However, a distinction could be made between good marketing that happens to be cool and hipster trendiness. Is it as simple as revenue and profitability?
Thanks for dropping by, Pat. I think it depends on the audience. In the case of PhoneBooth and others in their space, they’re primarily talking to the decision maker (ie. very small business owner), so they can afford more the risk required to really go after the buyer’s emotional side (ie. cool factor). Same can be said for approaching the developer crowd. In the enterprise, on the other hand, hipster can have the adverse effect — by implying that your company is new, young and perhaps as yet not proven enough to satisfy the average enterprise buyer risk profile.