• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, August 9, 2013

Although it took a financial hit for the quarter doing so, T-Mobile is re-proving perhaps the truest of marketing truisms: you create customers by giving people what they want.

Call it the Pittsburgh Pirates of the telecom business, as the Wall Street Journal’s Miriam Gottfried pretty much does. “It has been a long time since T-Mobile US could call itself No. 1,” her lede tells us. “But it was in first place by at least one metric in the second quarter: net contract phone-subscriber additions.”

Overall, it added 1.1 million customers in the quarter that ended on June 30, including 685,000 of the desirable contract subscribers, “[blowing] past analysts’ expectations,” Gottfried reports, “and [demonstrating] the resurgent No. 4 carrier is moving quickly to take market share from larger competitors such as AT&T.”

How is it doing so? Glad you asked, president and CEO John Legere is just about sputtering with glee in a prepared statement.

“T-Mobile’s Un-carrier approach -- [or “Un-carrier schtick,” as the hed on Devindra Hardawar’s coverage in VentureBeat puts it] -- has clearly resonated with consumers,” he says. “By fixing the things that drive them mad, like contracts and upgrades, and freeing them from the two-year sentences imposed on them by our competitors, they are choosing the new T-Mobile in unprecedented numbers.”

But wait. There will be more: “We are just beginning and we will continue” -- blah, blah, blah -- “driving significant shareholder value creation.”

Now about that last point. 

“The change is costing T-Mobile,” points out Brian X. Chen in the New York Times. “The company posted a loss of $16 million for the quarter, compared with a profit of $207 million in the same period a year ago. But it also reported revenue of $6.23 billion, up from $4.9 billion last year.” Chen also reports that although it’s still a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, it’s the first time “T-Mobile US reported earnings as a separate company after its merger with MetroPCS.”

That merger is helping T-Mobile to build up is network, which seriously lags its competitors.

“T-Mobile's 4G LTE network rollout has reached 157 million people in 116 metro areas -- a ramp helped along by the newly acquired MetroPCS, which expanded T-Mobile service into 15 new markets,” reportsPCMag’s Stephanie Mlot. “The soon-to-be-completed purchase of 10MHz of Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum from U.S. Cellular should also boost T-Mobile's coverage.”

Finally adding the iPhone to its roster of devices on April 12 -– it was the last of the four major carriers to do so -- didn’t hurt either. IPhone sales accounted for about “29% of T-Mobile’s branded gross customer additions and upgrade smartphone sales, excluding MetroPCS,” according to the company, which also reported “strong sales” for competing devices, particularly the Samsung Galaxy S4, the main nettle in Apple’s hide.

Legere, in fact, “downplayed” the iPhone in his earnings call with investors and analysts, reports CNET’s Marguerite Reardon. “The one-time pent-up demand for the iPhone is not the explanation for our second-quarter results,” he said. “The iPhone 5 is a significant part of how we compete, and it will continue to be. But it’s the combination of our brand and the ‘Uncarrier Strategy’ that made the impact.”

Call it what you will -- strategy, slogan, schtick -- the “Un-Carrier” repositioning “appears to be working,” John McDermott writes in Ad Age, “at least according to research from YouGov. The brand perception firm found that, for the first time since it began tracking the data a year ago, smartphone users are more likely to switch to T-Mobile than Verizon.”

Naming AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless, YouGov asked consumers: “If you’ve heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word of mouth, was it positive or negative?” T-Mobile more than doubled its “BrandIndex Buzz” score from “less than 7 points prior to the unveiling of the ‘Un-carrier’ to about 15 points in mid-April when it surpassed Verizon for the top spot,” McDermott reports.

Last month, T-Mobile “announced a groundbreaking new program, JUMP!, which enables people to upgrade their phones when they want, up to twice a year as soon as six months from enrollment,” at an event in New York City, as the press release told us, as well as a humorous (if you consider fat jokes funny) new campaign with “Saturday Night Live” alumnus Bill Hader.

T-Mobile CMO Mike Sievert tellsAll Things D’s Ina Fried that 700,000 customers have since signed up for the program and “we are rapidly on the march to one million.” 

We’ll see just how high JUMP! -- and whatever other plans Legere and cohorts may be sitting on -- goes over the summer quarter and get back to you sometime in November. Brrrrr.