Carrier's and Manufacturers Just Don't Get It!!!

As I was preparing some notes for a case study I am contributing too, I decided to review some of the cellular carrier and cellular manufacturer mobile sites. Not thinking, I tried to hit up AT&T from a T-Mobile device. I got the full desktop page, not a mobile page. Then it hit me, I always access the manufacturer's sites from their devices, and low and behold I get a mobile formatted site. The same is true for the carriers. When I bring up a specific carrier on that carrier's phone, I get the mobile page. When I try to pull up a carrier site from a competitor's phone, I get the full desktop page. In fact, if I tried to get to T-Mobile's page form a competitor's BlackBerry, I got an error message stating that the site was incompatible with my device.

With over 265 million mobile users in the U.S., you would think that the carriers and manufacturers would try to make information a little bit more accessable to people looking to switch.

Carriers and manufacturers: build mobile sites that not only give mobile users access to the story that would make them switch, but take it a step further and customize the message based on the browser and the carrier that brought them to you. If I hit AT&T from a T-Mobile BlackBerry, I should get a page that sings the praises of the BlackBerry Bold and it's 3G network. If I hit HTC from a Palm Treo, they should be shouting out the benefits of Windows Mobile or Android (depending on who is subsidizing the website that month).

There aren't many new customers out there. Its time to start marketing to your competitor's customers where they are, on their phone.