Maximizing the Effectiveness of your Phone Number
The phone number as a component of a branding strategy has decreased in importance over the past two decades as the web has become the first point of contact for most companies and organizations. However, it remains an important element, especially in market segments with limited access to the Internet, such as the senior citizen segment, or where the nature of the business makes the phone number the logical first point of contact.
Many companies and organizations, in fact, use their phone number as the primary element of their branding strategy:
Note that while the domain names of 1-800-Flowers and 1-800-Got-Junk are Flowers.com and GotJunk.com, even if your phone number is a much less important part of your branding strategy, the value of your brand is enhanced by having a correspondence between your domain name and phone number. Such is the case with Comcast(.com), which can be reached via 1-800-Comcast, 1-877-Comcast, as well as 1-888-Comcast, and Best Western(.com), which can be reached at 1-800-Western.
Of course, it helps if your brand name happens to be seven characters long. If the name is shorter (or longer) than this, the phone number is often presented with a mnemonic combination of numbers and/or letters, either using the brand name, or a word or words related to the brand name. Orkin, for example, uses two very effective phone numbers, 1-888-OrkinMan (in association with their most recent ad campaign) and 1-800-800-Orkin.
In another example, Super 8 Motel's phone number strategy illustrates a particularly interesting and ingenious tactic which uses a mnemonic yet meaningful string of numbers:
Others use a variety of tactics in their efforts to make their phone numbers more memorable than what would otherwise be a string of a 10 digits which only the cognitively gifted would be able to successfully store and later retrieve from long-term memory. The examples presented below represent an array of effectiveness levels.
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