Remember The Name, Not The Number

DOMINO'S Pizza is the latest company to turn to the nascent technique of phone name marketing as a means of getting its brand and telephone number to the top of consumer's minds.

In the next few weeks the pizza chain will conduct a trial of the number 1300 Dominos, following in the footsteps of Westpac, Hayman Island resorts and Qantas Holidays, according to Phone Name Marketing founder Jack Singleton.

The move follows Roy Morgan research on awareness of phone names compared to conventional telephone numbers. It found that unaided recall of 1300 Westpac, for example, was 13.2 per cent nationally and as high as 30 per cent in Queensland, where the number got a larger media burst last year. The figures compare favourably to conventional phone number recall, such as the Federal Government's national terrorist hotline which registered unprompted awareness of just 0.3 per cent despite a $30 million ad campaign promoting it.

Armed with such research results, Mr Singleton, the son of renowned adman John, is going on the offensive.

"This validates what we have been saying for years now," Mr Singleton said. "We can really get out there and knock on some doors."

Westpac was more guarded in its endorsement. "We are evaluating the trial and we have yet to make a decision to extend it to the rest of the network," Westpac spokesman David Lording said.

But the company that scored the highest awareness in the Morgan research was one that does not have a phone name, Pizza Hut, which scored 16.7 per cent. In Sydney, where the number 9481 1111 has been promoted for years, awareness was as high as 20 per cent while in Queensland, which has a different number, it was 9 per cent.

"That's a pretty good number, if you are paying $15 million a year in ads," Mr Singleton said, referring to the higher figure. "My gut feeling is that it would be 60 per cent in a year if it had a phone name. Domino's has three numbers to run, that's three versions of the TV ad to cut."

Domino's scored a respectable 7.3 per cent in the survey and Mr Singleton is promising them an equally spectacular leap in awareness after the trial. "If they don't I'll give them their money back."

Mr Singleton first came across the idea of phone name marketing in New York in the mid 1990s. After intense lobbying he convinced the authorities to switch from releasing the numbers in sequential batches to releasing them all at one time. He has since bought up about 2000 phone names for $2 million.