Dial 800 Toll-free

 

Telemarketing has become big business, with big numbers (nearly a quarter of a million 800-number lines in the United States today, with 1.9 billion calls made in 1982) and big names (in addition to airlines, hotels, car-rental companies, and the like, fully 85% of the Fortune 500 companies have some form of toll-free customer service). With this boom has also come a sharp rise in the use of so-called anagram numbers: phone numbers that spell out the name of a company, its product or service, or some similarly memorable trademark. But how memorable or marketable are these numbers? Opinion remains noticeably divided.

When Al Felly, owner of Felly's Flowers Inc. in Madison, Wis., got his 800 FLORIST number back in April 1982, it came through a combination of serendipity and technological advance. Incoming WATS service had first been offered in 1967, but it took another 15 years before AT&T offered a system whereby local exchanges are no longer relevant, thus allowing access to toll-free national exchanges that are not geographically specific. This measure of "portability," as AT&T service manager Dave Coke characterizes it, has opened the floodgates for anagram numbers: With 1.4 billion "alpha translations" available through 179 separate exchanges, the possibilities are literally -- and literarily -- endless.

Despite its aggressiveness in promoting telemarketing, however, Ma Bell has shied away from actively playing the number-letter game. Coke explains that since many seven-digit numbers are not available, AT&T can't always deliver what the customer might want. a situation it finds anathema. The company even declares in its contracts that it will not provide alphabetical translations of numbers, either in its phone directories (except in display ads) or with directory assistance. Furthermore, one condition for assigning numbers is that any potential 800 customer Mustn't advertise his soon-to-be installed number -- "including an alphabetical translation thereof" -- until it is in service.

"We're really not in the business of selling words," says Coke, who concedes he gets about 10 inquiries a day from his own service representatives about the availability of certain anagram numbers. "What the number happens to spell is immaterial as far as we're concerned."

Even the phone company sat up and took notice though, when Greg Griswold walked in and asked for nearly 5,000 anagram numbers. Griswold, 29, also of Madison, had been running a beekeeping supply house when he discovered what the number 1-800 BEE-HIVE could do for his shipping orders (up from $480,000 to $3.2 million in two years). Fascinated, he took the names and/or logos of the best-known companies in the United States, fed them into a computer, and came up with a shopping list of every anagram from 800 NABISCO to 800 THE CHASE. He then deduced that if he could get the numbers, he could approach the corresponding companies with his own marketing service that would use their name identification. Only three clients have come aboard to date, and Griswold is already out $50,000 for the cost of reserving the first 350 lines he was granted (at about $134 per line), but he remains undaunted. He is even applying to have his new company, Ciphrex Datacom (dial 1-800 DATACOM), declared a utility in all 50 states.

If you hear the 'number' once, you remember it for life, and that can be a tremendous marketing edge," Griswold says.

Others are not nearly so sure that U.S. business habits are going to be permanently revolutionized by the equivalent of a national spelling bee.

"Some anagrams are cute, and some work quite well, like 800 FLORIST," notes marketing consultant Jon Hamilton, former chairman of the telephone marketing council of the Direct Marketing Association. "Others can get all mixed up unless the customer is sitting in front of his television set with a pad and pencil. To be honest, I'm not all that big a fan of them. To me, a phone number that's memorable is something that almost sings out when you say it."

"There's absolutely no conclusive data to suggest that anagram numbers outperform easy-to-remember regular numbers," adds Ernan Roman, senior vice-president for market development with Campaign Communications Institute of America Inc. in New York City. "All we know is that the guys who have them say they do. There are pitfalls, though. I have one client, a major company whose name ends in 'O', that was quite interested in getting an anagram number. I pointed out to them that callers might not know whether to push '6' for 'O' or zero for Operator. The client agreed with me and dropped the whole idea."

While the marketing experts squabble over the merits of memorable names versus digits that sing, nobody has yet been able to explain why these numbers are referred to as "anagrams" in the first place. An anagram is a word or phrase formed by reordering another word or phrase (e.g., "tubs" and "stub"); numbers are not part of the equation. Perhaps the federal judge who rules on FLORIST versus FLOWERS will have an opinion on that semantic issue as well.