AT&T at one time hatched an idea — a fast-follower copycat plan drawn from IBM’s marketing playbook.
AT&T rolled out vertical marketing, made up of industry-specific applications for roughly 20 vertical markets. For example, some solutions were developed for healthcare, others for banking, more for automotive, and so on. The industry marketing tool worked for AT&T, like a charm. I know, because I worked on the program development.
AT&T wouldn’t claim inventor status of the vertical industry marketing model, because the company wasn’t its inventor; it had yielded first-mover advantage to IBM.
