Selling the Pre: Happy Pre Users Offer Ideas

As this test drive winds down, I find myself wanting to provide some closure to these posts. And how better to provide closure than to look forward?

So, in the spirit of moving forward with the Palm Pre, I have collected the following ideas based on happy Pre user experiences. Some of these are pretty great.

Maybe Sprint/Palm should have another contest for the best Pre marketing idea?

PreCentral member "Meriweather" describes one possible TV commercial:

Have a series of ads that play on the use of cards and multi-tasking--an arena where Palm has an advantage over the iPhone. For example, an ad with a street magician saying, "pick a card, any card" to a throng, and you pan in, and he flips through a series of apps on the Pre, showing calendar, Pandora, email, photos, TV, whatever you want to show off. People in the crowd are oohing and aahing, and shouting out, "we want pandora", "play a video" "check email", etc. Then the magician says, "no problem we can do all of them. All at the same time." The crowd cheers, except one guy with slumped shoulders, who slinks away.

"Ronlongo" describes his idea:

How about an ad where they show all of life's things going on all over the place (meetings, tasks lists, emails, etc.) like a jumbled chaos maybe as separate (but live) images moving around at random on the screen and the actor going crazy trying to manage and remember it all.

Then swap to another actor. Suddenly all the activities resolve into a deck of playing cards again with live pictures on them. For example, one depicting a meeting at work going on, another showing Little Pete's baseball game, etc. the actor shuffles through the cards with ease managing them with complete ease. The meeting card depicts the meeting come to an end and the actor discards the card.

Finally the actor pulls all the cards together into a stack. Touches the top of the stack (where the Pre's power button is) and the stack resolves into a Palm Pre.

Pre user "Affe" offers the following idea:

If I were Sprint I would advertise many things including synergy by saying 'All your contacts and calenders from all over the web 'seamlessly' integrated together.' Make it sound like something people would really want. Possibly advertise photo geotagging, direct Facebook picture uploading, and wireless charging! Not necessary the biggest features for us, but I think these things are what people will be like 'wow that phone sounds cool' even if those aren't the most unique features. Their current multitasking ads, imo, have no real appeal.

User "galavanter" suggests,

Resurrect what Ad Age calls the #1 campaign of the 20th century: THINK SMALL.

"West3man" says,

I'd love to see Palm show someone frustrated with another phone, maybe an iPhone, because it can't do X, then show someone with a Pre doing X quickly and easily... The problem with the Pre is that you kinda have to be a smartphone user to get what a big deal some of its features are. Otherwise, before sharing the feature, Palm needs to make people aware of the problem that it addresses. That kind of thing has to be done very very delicately otherwise eyes will glaze over... except for tech-heads like us.

User "gbp" describes the following possible ad:

Sit in the car. Bring up the navigation system then plan a route. Let the voice activated commands be heard. Bring up the SPRINT TV or Pandora , and start listening to music. When the navigation system kicks in for a turn by turn prompt , SPRINT TV or Pandora goes mute. This is not a great feature, but for the majority non tech dumb phone users, this is huge.

They will run to the closest SPRINT Store to buy one. Navigation is a must for many.

If you want to contribute your own ideas or vote on those here, post your response as a comment below!