Seven : Three years to build it, one appointment to lose it

What one challenger got right, and what usually happens next. Part seven is the evidence that successful telecom branding is achievable rather than theoretical, followed by a warning about what tends to happen once the cure starts working.

For a low texture brand to succeed in the long term you have to build the brand. The invisible connection and the innovations of other people are never going to give anyone a reason to stay connected to YOU, no matter how many ‘firsts’ you claim to bring to the region.

So if your brand suffers from a serious lack of texture, how do you create something people will fall in love with?

Bahrain, against the odds

You start where all successful telecom branding starts, with a serious review of the market and a compelling proposition that is uniquely yours.

When Viva hit the Bahrain market the competition was fierce and the landscape saturated, yet a little over three years later Viva enjoyed one of the region’s best brand equity results.

Setting their tone of voice as an aesthetically cool, enhanced reality whose youthful exuberance was personified in the rallying cry to Live Every Moment, Viva captured the sweet spot between Zain’s wild untamed “inzain in the brain” and Batelco’s “red or dead” nationalism.

In the early years Viva invested in their brand position and promise. Yes they supported it with offers and enhanced value, but they also considered the other brand touchpoints: simplified product plans, brand activations, enhanced content and stimulating partnerships. And the money followed the brand.

Being early days the retail experience and service were questionable, but the whole thing was refreshing and it held promise, because the brand was treated as an asset worth building. That is what successful telecom branding looks like in its first three years.

“In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.” — Coco Chanel

Chanel understood something most challenger brands forget the moment they stop being challengers. Difference is not a launch tactic. It is the entire basis on which a customer decides you cannot be swapped for somebody cheaper, and it is the asset successful telecom branding exists to protect.

How it usually gets thrown away

What typically happens when your brand succeeds is that the visionaries retire from the front line and in comes the sales guy with his tried and tested BOGOF offers and a race-to-the-bottom focus on “tactical”. Stop me if I yawn.

Out goes the engaging advertising, the innovative digital work and the interesting activations, and down comes the brand equity and the desire. Before long your difference has evaporated and you are in the commodity business, flogging other people’s handsets using the same handset manufacturer’s images and instantly forgettable stock shots of smiling children in a ‘blandsville’ family scenario.

The potential for meaningful engagement is lost and its life enhancing potential squandered.

The reader may at this point scoff a little, perhaps choking on their latte. ‘Life enhancing?’ It may sound far fetched, but indulge me. Telecoms operators provide the means for people to connect, to share, to learn, to keep memories, to play, to listen and to talk. In other words, to express themselves. All their selves, all the time, everywhere.

The humble phone has become ‘my phone, my lifeline, the object I cannot do without’, yet the average telco squanders this precious relationship building potential in a slew of emotionless, competition crushing offers designed to maximise the number of connections while losing sight of the point of making the connection in the first place.

Next in part eight: the audit itself. Ten touchpoints, three brands and one honest afternoon.