, advertising, and promotion campaigns for the most important products and services of BT. The description of these marketing and advertising initiatives will be in chronological order focusing primarily on the period between 1996 and the present. The report will conclude with an overview of BT's marketing and advertising options both nationally and internationally with or without MCI and WorldCom.
Residential Telephone Marketing and Advertising
The telecommunications services industry in Britain was privatized in 1984 (Moor, 1996). Up until that time if you lived in Great Britain and were unlucky enough to need a new telephone, you would have faced a wait of up to six months. And once BT arrived at your door you could have had the phone anywhere you wanted as long as it was in the hallway (Lynch, 1966).
When BT went private, a second company, called Mercury was formed. A government review of telecommunication policy in 1991 led to the end of this BT and Mercury Communications duopoly of fixed line domestic services in the UK. In that same year, cable television companies--mostly funded by money from the regional Baby Bells in the United States and Canada--began laying telephone lines along with coaxial television wires to British homes. The floodgates were thrown open by this action and by 1995 some 75 licenses had been issued for alternative public telecommunication operators. Presently the figure is in excess of 190 carriers licensed to provide phone service in competition with BT (Mills, 1996).
This drastically changed telecommunications climate means, for example, that today in Cambridge England most homes can choose among four different connections to a local telephone service. They can use a conventional fixed copper line from BT. They can ask Cambridge Cable, their local cable-television company to install a fixed-line service, as British cable companies have been free to do since 1991. They can go to ...