Vonage Promotions Blog

At the end of July, Vonage named a new CEO.  The man for the job is former Cingular Wireless Chief Marketing Officer Marc Lefar.  Now at age 44, Lefar will take over the executive officer spot for Jeffery Citron, Vonage founder and chairman.

Citron will still stay active in the company, but will be handing off a lot of repsonsibilities to Lefar.  Lefar has a lot of hard work ahead of him.  He will be working mostly on Vonage’s long term plan now that the company is out of hot water.

The hope is that Lefar’s marketing knowledge and prior experience in the same field will aid the company in improving its marketing strategy without heavily increasing the cost of advertising.

We all remember the 2007 patent infringement lawsuit between Vonage and Verizon.  Verizon raised the suit against Vonage over an issue of 7 patents and the court ruling was harsh, even preventing Vonage from signing up new customers.  An appeal from Vonage to this decision greatly reduced the severity of this ruling and got Vonage rolling again.

Earlier this week, it was reported that Vonage asked a federal appeals court for a reconsideration of the ruling which upheld most of the charges of patent infringment.  This means that another settlement is possible.

It was a tough year for Vonage in 2007, most of it being spent in the courtroom.  In 2008 they have been wise in the fact that they have made smart finacing decisions and are still trying to get rid of some of the lawsuit debt.

Early on in the VoIP industry, there were issues with 911 calling.  With no hard fixed location to trace, 911 callers would have to explain exactly where they were in order for any emergency personnel to be able to find them.  This was a pretty unfortunate con to voice over internet protocol phone service.

Fortunately, there have been several improvements made to correct this problem.  E911 has made it possible to make effective 911 to be made and tracked.  Unfortunately, there are many places that still do not have E911 capabilities meaning there are still several places that are vulnerable when it comes to calling emergency services.

Last week, President Bush signed a bill into law that calls for all VoIP companies to offer service that has the same 911 capabilities as regular phone service.  This will make VoIP 911 equal to regular 911 in it’s ability an reliability.  With a service that is slowing replacing traditional telephone, it is important to ensure that it is as safe as possible.

Perhaps the next big problem to solve will be the power loss issue.  There are already VoIP backup batteries, but something will have to be done for all VoIP customers sooner or later.

I think just about everyone here has seen at least a few Vonage commercials.  There was the beach commercial, and who could forget the hilarious geek and super model in sports car commercial.

Vonage’s commercials have had a different effect on many people.  Some people are somewhat offended by some of them, but the bottom line is that they are pretty funny and downright effective advertising.  Aside from the funny concept behind every commercial, we are all reminded of the Vonage theme song.   This memorable tune just glues itself to the minds of everyone who hears it.

These effective Vonage commercials have been a large factor in the success of building their large customer base.  All that said and done, Vonage has somewhat shifted their perspective and started to make a few “information based” commercials that inform more about the details of some of their new products.  Vonage, although they have cut back on advertising costs, continues to diversify the ways in which they do advertise and the company continues to grow under this trend.

Vonage continued to grow in the second quarter of 2008.  The quarterly report showed revenue growth of 11% equaling a total of $227.5 million.  This is great news for Vonage, especially considering how things we’re going last year at this time.

Vonage has cut back heavily on TV advertising in order to decease spending or dedicate more to the development of new features and services.  Although advertising was down, Vonage still up to a very large 2.6 million customers.

With a heavy turnover rate, Vonage’s top priority now is to better relations with their customers.  Perhaps even more important than adding large amounts of customers in the third quarter is to make sure that they don’t lose as many as in Q2.  In order to achieve this, Vonage continues to increase the quality customer support and make it more convenient.