The ad reflects a fundamental shift in Vodafone’s brand and communications strategy, explains Daryl Fielding, director of UK brand marketing and communications. “Not only does it convey a more ‘human’ side to the brand, but it also disrupts the trivialisation of the category,” she says. As a counterpoint to the emotion, the ad also claimed that 77% of emergency services use Vodafone, and the end-line is: ‘Power to our emergency services. Power to you.’

The net effect, says Fielding, is to convey “a simple message that everyone can identify with – the importance of connectivity and the dependability of Vodafone’s network.”

The new, more ‘engaging’, approach to communications is a response to the maturing of the mobile market, she continues. “To date, mobile marketing has been driven largely by supply-side economics. But with penetration near saturation, the emphasis is increasingly on customers, and it’s becoming more and more important for us to figure out how to innovate and differentiate our offering from those of our competitors.”
In this new climate, customer and consumer insight has become critical. The traditional brand attributes of Vodafone evolved, almost accidentally, largely as a result of it leading the mobile network market for so long. But the new brand positioning and communications strategy are firmly underpinned by deep customer insight.
Mike Taylor, head of consumer and enterprise market research at the company, takes up the story.

“You start with that old qualitative game where you ‘invite brands to a party’ and ask what sort of person each would be,” says Taylor. “People thought Vodafone would turn up in formal wear, act a bit aloof, be a bit older than other people in the room – and while that has positives in the sense of being mature and serious, the downside is the lack of approachability. By contrast, they thought that some of the other network brands would behave like party animals and empty your drinks cabinet.”

He continues: “You then start to explore the deeper meaning of what the network means to customers, and what it provides for them. And the answer coming through was that people are increasingly reliant on their mobiles. Our research showed that the rather frivolous positioning of some of our competitors is completely at odds with the very serious role that the phone plays in people’s lives.”

This frivolity may be appropriate for some consumer groups; but it can backfire. For example, when EE had a network outage last March [ 2014 ] it sent pictures of gremlins to its inconvenienced customers, compounding their annoyance. For all its new humanity, Vodafone is at pains to treat its customers with respect, explains Fielding: “Where customers feature in our ads, we are very respectful of them, and admire and celebrate what they are doing with the technology.”

The new ‘Vodafone Firsts’ social media campaign epitomises this balance. The campaign represents a radical departure from the company’s 25-year global sponsorship strategy, which it has replaced. ‘Firsts’ are short videos of real people doing remarkable things for the first time, enabled by technology. One of the first was ‘Flying Nans’, featuring two Dutch grandmothers experiencing and discussing their first-ever flight, and sharing their experience via the Vodafone network. Humorous and heart-warming, such videos not only “add warmth and humanity to the brand,” says Fielding, but also “connect cleverly with the benefits of the product.”
People’s reliance on their mobile devices and networks is so heavy that many don’t even have a landline these days, points out Taylor. And things are changing very fast. “Two years ago, standing in the middle of a field, you would only expect to be able to make a call. Today, not only do you expect to be able to call and text, but you also expect the phone to show you a map of exactly what field you are in and let you tweet about it,” he says.

Both functionality and emotion have a big role to play in network marketing, claims Fielding, who disagrees that networks are essentially ‘commodities’. “It is possible to differentiate on the basis of network quality,” she insists. “Our Red 4G plans, for instance, are unique because of the content included – customers can choose from Spotify, Sky Sport or Netflix.”

She continues: “I think it is in the gift of the category itself to determine whether or not it is commoditised,” pointing out that maintaining a national network that gives people the desired coverage, ability to make and hold a call, and download video without buffering, is “harder than it looks”.

What’s more, ‘good network performance’ means different things to different people, particularly now that data has become a mass-market commodity too, observes Taylor. “Our investment in improving the network has to be more nuanced now, and we try to focus our efforts on the areas that are of most benefit to most customers.”

But delivering the ‘boy-racer download speeds’ beloved of some of Vodafone’s competitors is not the answer, maintains Fielding. “The ability to make and hold a call is critical, and we are one of the few operators to talk about that,” she says. It’s an insight that informs all Vodafone’s recent advertising, including the ‘Every minute matters’ executions, featuring, among other things, a new grandfather and a man talking to his dog.

What’s more, while most of the consumer excitement in the mobile market has traditionally centred on the handsets, this might be about to change, notes Taylor. “Historically, the ‘shiny hero’ has been the smartphone, but research over the past year indicates that consumer interest in smartphones might have peaked,” he says. “Some people are onto their third or fourth smartphone, and there is a sense of ‘how much shinier and sexier can this box actually look?’. So the handset market has matured a bit too, which has thrown the spotlight back onto where innovation is in the category. That’s a great opportunity for the network providers.”

He describes the network as “the oil that makes mobile communications work,” adding that being able to reinforce, through advertising, the fact that Vodafone ‘gets’ customers’ reliance on the service it provides, is important to them. He says: “Understanding what people’s phones actually mean to them is a valuable insight that the operators who try to be shoutier and spanglier and more fun than anybody else appear to miss.”

And, when translated into advertising, it works. “Our empathy with people attracts them to us, and our brand tracking measures show that customers’ warmth and empathy with our brand is improving,” he claims.
But infusing the Vodafone brand with more character and personality has needed careful handling, says Fielding: “It can’t suddenly try to be something it isn’t, because consumers won’t see it as authentic.”
She and her team have helped the brand to make the transition by holding onto and reinforcing one of its key elements – the ‘Power to you’ strapline.

Some network brands go to different sections of the market in different guises – 02 markets to chief technology officers as ‘Telefonica’ rather than the consumer-focused ‘Be more dog’, for example. By contrast, Vodafone’s universal insight – people’s increasing reliance on their mobiles – has allowed it to run a single communications campaign across the whole brand.

‘Power to’ is now used in nearly every advertisement – ‘Power to the emergency services. Power to you’, ‘Power to the family. Power to you’,’ ‘Power to the ones you love. Power to you’, ‘Power to entrepreneurs. Power to you’, and so on.

“It’s the first time ‘Power to you’ really means something,” says Fielding.

The benefits of this ‘unifying insight’ have been even greater than the team anticipated, as Taylor explains.

“In the past we have taken a slightly siloed approach to our business and consumer markets in the belief that different things matter to each of them,” he says. “But our research has found there is a lot more commonality than we assumed in terms of what they value. What’s more, the two can reinforce each other: seeing businesses’ reliance on the network gives consumers greater confidence in it.”

The ‘Firefighter’ ad, he says, was “a classic example of being able to run a single ad across business and consumer markets and get real benefits.” Not only was consumers’ feedback extremely positive, “but it was also the best-reviewed ad by business customers for the past 10 years.”

But while the new executions are very story-oriented, Fielding is impatient with the current obsession with storytelling, which she describes as “this year’s universal paradigm for marketing”. She insists: “Marketing is still essentially about what it’s always been about – customer insight, brand and getting a message across, ideally in seven words or fewer.”

Nevertheless, she feels that if we could look back on today from a point 50 years in the future, “we would see that the broadcast era, when messages were sent out and the public lapped them up, was something of an anomaly in the history of marketing.” She explains: “Marketing has normally been about individual relationships and reputations – think small-town bank. We are now reverting to a model of marketing that existed 50 or 60 years ago, albeit at a scale enabled by digital technology.”

This article originally appeared in Impact magazine, Issue 8 January 2015.