Welcome to my blog – my first entry in my first blog. I have been very excited to become an active voice in the greater community, sharing information related to marketing and the media in the high-tech entrepreneurial space. I had the opportunity to attend the Word of Mouth (WOM) Marketing Conference this week in DC on December 11-13 and am now even more excited to start this blog! I’ll be letting you know all about the impact WOM is having online and offline in future entries.

But first, I’d like to get to know my readers, and I’m certain that you’d like to know something about me as well. I’ll cover the earlier part of my career so you can understand how my background in computing and in marketing and media has come together. This entry is going to be longer than usual. I promise future ones will be shorter.

The Early Days

I started my career at AT&T back when it was the big behemoth – the mother of all telephone companies, fondly and many times, not so fondly, named Ma Bell.  Alexander Graham Bell was a technology leader in his day and set in motion a communications revolution. By the time I joined AT&T it was the largest employer in the nation and in New Jersey and was a monopoly.  I laughed when I was told about the golden handcuffs.  The theory went that once you were lucky enough to be anointed as a Ma Bell employee, you would be well-taken care of and stay there throughout your career.  I was so certain that this would never apply to me that I didn’t sign up for the 401K plan until six months after I was eligible.

 My first job at AT&T was a computer programmer, an entry-level management position. AT&T was a powerhouse company, and they wanted every programmer to get the same training – whether or not they had previous training or experience working in the field. They had high standards and often began a training class with all experienced programmers. Since I was largely a novice in this field and still made the cut, I felt fortunate. Those first three months were grueling. Every exam was a pass or get fired experience. This was my first venture into the technology world of computing, and so, from the very beginning, even though AT&T was voice-centric, my experiences were data-centric.

I was always interested in advertising and marketing and was fortunate to work on the company’s business marketing system.  Thus, I was able to be a techie and yet deal with marketing data. Every Bell Operating Company (BOC) in the nation had to send all their business customer data to headquarters each month to Marketing. The systems consisted of JCL running many huge programs, primarily in Cobol, strung together. The programs that were sent out by headquarters did not include the source code - they were sent as object code or executable modules. The operating companies got creative and would intersperse their own programs into the system. This sometimes created havoc.  (Note: most PC or Mac users are still just running programs and don’t have access to the code – case in point – I’m writing this in Word, a Microsoft proprietary program or application.)

During these years, very few people knew much about computers and programs, and systems analysts (which I became) were highly regarded.  To the average person, this was like a huge black box. And people in the industry worked hard to keep it this way. One of the ways was using jargon, which made everything seemed more serious, difficult to learn, and, well, elitist.  I mention this here, because there are a couple of themes I will come back to:  you’ve got the experts working very hard to maintain an aura of awe around them, and you’ve got lay people who are always playing catch up. You’ve also got the hockey stick learning curve that highlights the gap between the techies with the everyday Joe or Jane during the product introduction period.  Once people get over the hump of having to learn something new, they often embrace it full-tilt, sending the techies off in a race to come up with the next major leap. Today, the pace has accelerated dramatically!

I was also fortunate to be exposed to Unix, which was created by two Bell Labs computer gurus, then given away to universities and others. Not only did we run small Unix programs (shells), but used this to store source code and the many iterations of changes, updates and fixes for all our systems’ programs.  Although this was the heyday of mainframe computing, Unix ran on mini computers which was really, in my view, the forerunner of the PC.  In fact, Microsoft borrowed a lot from Unix to come out with their personal computer operating system, DOS, making it understandable to me from the start and giving me a leg up on understanding personal computing technology. 

I know how antiquated this all sounds in today’s world of technology and nano technology, but we were at the cusp of massive changes that would take place in the industry.  Many people today look at pre-post Internet as a major sea-change, and it was. However, in the mid 1980s the shift to individuals having their own computer and running programs was also a major change. People could control their own data, their own technology and their own learning.

The Transition

Well, this must seem like a long way from marketing and the media, but these two areas intersected for me very nicely.  I got my MBA in Marketing while I was working in a technical field at AT&T.  The opportunity struck to shift my career in that direction at the time when the federal government was forcing AT&T to compete and giving MCI marketplace advantages. I worked on a divestiture system that dealt with managing the breakup of the Bell system, dealing with more acronyms than ever – clacs, inter-latas, intra-latas to name a few. Seven baby Bells were created, leaving AT&T with the long distance market and cut off from the local market and its customer records.

My next assignment was another stepping stone toward marketing. I transferred to headquarters marketing and managed a walk-in computing center for all of marketing where there were thousands (yes, I believe that’s right) of marketing employees (295 N. Maple Avenue, Basking Ridge). This was a center for people to learn software, work on personal computers, use printers, and, yes, they once existed, pen plotters. Within two years, all of this would be dismantled and most management level employees, including me, would be equipped with desktop functionality.  Graphics programs replaced pen plotters and make them obsolete overnight. 

Another transfer or so later I ended up in the Consumer Long Distance Market Research group where thirty-some professionals were all working independently supporting different internal clients, most of whom were in marketing. Knowing computing again came in very handy. Although we didn’t actively use SAS or SPSS (programs that manage data and statistics), we established the analysis plans for research studies, defined how the data would be used and managed the analysis.  My first clients were mainly just a handful of district and division managers responsible for customer retention. At first, this was not a very sexy area to be involved with. However, within a very short time, our ninety-something market share dropped precipitously. [For example, a 1995 Federal Communications Commission report, page 16, http://www.ftc.gov/reports/telecomm.pdf  states that AT&T’s market share was 95% in 1982 and by 1987 it had dropped to 60%.]  Thus, by the late 80s, the Marketing Retention division had grown to over 100 managers and a new Winback division was even larger. I conducted a large number of studies to support the marketing strategy and fight to retain a leadership position (but only a smattering of projects that dealt with new technology).  This afforded me with the opportunity to find hard-to-reach movers, test profuse numbers of direct marketing approaches (telemarketing and direct mail) and numerous messages, establish needs, analyze the concept of loyalty, explore brand images, observe competitive activity and explore ad claims.

There were other opportunities as well. One of these was the youth market. This included assessing brand images—AT&T versus other, well-known brands (McDonalds, Apple, …), and, at the time, evaluating leading edge plans such as bringing PCs into the classroom, installing them in the homes of school-age children, and beginning to use the power of communications beyond the once-narrow scope of long distance calling. Collaborations were being waged with innovative school systems. Bell Labs had begun to focus more on exploring practical new means of advancing communications and less on pure science.

I was promoted and transferred to the Business-to-Business products side of the business shortly before AT&T decided to focus all its efforts on services. At the time, business products had been a major financial drain. So, within a matter of months, I learned that I would no longer work for the old Ma after all; I would work for a newly formed company which had yet to be named [Lucent Technologies]. There was a mad scramble among employees who were placing bets on which side of the business would prosper. More people bet on AT&T than on the future Lucent.  At Lucent first seemed like a good place to be; later, Lucent would be struggling as well.  In retrospect, for me, career-wise, this shift gave me the opportunity to learn about a lot of technological pursuits the newly formed Lucent was undertaking. While Lucent had the power of Bell Labs behind it – Bell Labs went to Lucent – it was also like a new company in many respects. [Note: my part of Lucent is now Avaya.] 

Our part of Lucent developed and sold business telephone systems (from Mom and Pop to Major Enterprises), and all the phone equipment was labeled AT&T. There was grave concern that customers would call AT&T for service or to buy new equipment and never learn about Lucent (AT&T legally had to have a hands-off relationship with its former business products customers and prospects). The other part of Lucent that sold central office equipment to companies like Verizon, which competed with AT&T, was anxious to lose the AT&T name. Our timely research proved that our business unit needed to use co-branding (legally allowed) during the transition period.

Still in marketing and still a researcher, it was exciting to be supporting a new company developing new products. The competition shifted from MCI and Sprint to Nortel and many other telecom manufacturers, and before long, to Cisco, Newbridge and a cast of other data companies and unlikely competitors (at least up until then), many of whom no longer exist. We conducted branding research, new customer segmentation approaches and customer needs and reaction to new concepts, such as wireless business telecom systems.

While contracting was my least favorite activity, I got plenty of experience writing and issuing requests for proposals (RFPs), evaluating and hiring suppliers (research vendors) and dealing with corporate contracting and accounts payable. It was while I was at Lucent that I gained international experience, with research conducted primarily in Brazil and Europe. My work included explorations to support business wireless systems and features and computer-telephony integration which, at the time, was what was meant by convergence and involved customer and service provider requirements for offers based on client-servers, the Internet, and emerging technologies. More traditional areas included call centers, video conferencing and messaging. Yet, even these areas were being transformed by new technology.

One of the most exciting areas involved transforming Lucent’s distribution channel based on customer buying prerequisites, shifting the business model from mainly direct sales to mainly indirect sales for small and mid-sized businesses. In addition, there were breakthroughs for the business globally in eliciting, identifying, and understanding customer needs in the North American, European, Asian, and Latin American markets, segmenting by observable cues, and then using this knowledge to drive offer generation. Our collaborative team of consultants and managers at headquarters and in Latin America studied competitive pricing to support Lucent in Brazil. I played a major role in leading a brainstorming session that named the Lucent-branded wireless business system, TransTalk. Looking back now on these years, we worked hard and lots of fun.

The Move to DC

Are you tired yet?  More to come later...