How To Undermine a $2.8 Billion Ad Budget for $10/Hour

A friend of mine has been a Verizon wireless customer for at least ten years. He is an accomplished former CMO of two Fortune 50 companies, but is not a technophile and occasionally has problems with the gagets in his life. Last week he went to a Verizon store where three sales ladies provided a customer experience would make any marketing executive cringe.

First they ignored him, even though he was the only one in the store. Then when they did pay attention to him, they condescended to him and laughed at him to his face. He is dropping his service and is telling anyone who will listen how horrible the experience was.

According to Ad Age, in 2006 Verizon had a $2.8 billion ad budget, ranking it as the 5th largest advertiser in the U.S. that year. What is remarkable is that three sales associates making $10 or $12 per hour managed to render those advertising dollars useless.

This to me is part of the challenge Chief Marketing Officers face and perhaps part of the reason the average CMO only lasts 22 months. My guess is that Mike Lanman, CMO at Verizon Wireless, doesn't have control of the retail channel. At the very least, he should control the types of people who are hired for their retail stores. Create a hiring profile and partner with HR to drive it into the front line hiring.

(Seth Godin wrote about Verizon and their CMO in 2005. Looks like much hasn't changed in three years.)

The product, pricing and promotion are important. But where are your customers interacting with your product and your company? Bad service trumps a good product in a commodity business like wireless.

We live in a multi channel world. If the CMO doesn't have control of the customer experience in every channel, the life expectancy of the CMO will not increase.