Case Studies

BellSouth
Misattribution to the Leader

BellSouth had a challenging mission when it hired Merkley Newman Harty, its first new advertising agency in years. It was facing deregulation, specifically the entry of AT&T into the local phone business. Leading an MNH team, Jay Helmer confronted a market in turmoil.

Jay’s campaign at MNH attempted to position BellSouth as a high technology company with the same resources as AT&T. Extensive consumer research and account planning had revealed that BellSouth customers considered the telco even more local then its actual seven-state territory would indicate. The new campaign would seek to remedy this misperception.

The advertising and marketing materials created to support this positioning were highly produced and represented a clear departure from the quality and tone of previous efforts. The campaign even used many of the cues and conventions of long distance advertising: modern settings, cityscapes, and celebrities.

The results were surprising and provided a bitter lesson in the realities of mass marketing: Consumers thought the new advertisements were for AT&T instead of BellSouth. The moral was clear — using cues traditionally associated with the "leading brand" in the category leads consumers to assume the advertising message is about the leader, in this case, AT&T. In this case, misperception was replaced with misattribution. It was a hard lesson, but Jay’s team wasn’t giving up.

MNH swiftly created new campaign, "Nobody Knows a Neighbor like a Neighbor," which successfully overcame existing misperceptions and rapidly created a solidly defensible position for BellSouth. The new tagline and marketing platform combined messages about BellSouth’s advanced technology and its familiarity with smaller markets, creating a competent yet folksy approach that AT&T could not replicate.