giffgaff

MARKETING

EXCELLENCE

giffgaff

People power builds a

breakthrough brand

The Marketing Society is a not-for-proﬁt organisation owned by its members, with over 2500 senior marketers. Over the

past 50 years it has emerged as one of the most inﬂuential drivers of marketing in the UK business community.

The Society challenges its members to think differently and to be bolder marketing leaders by supporting the development

of leading-edge thinking, and promoting the evidence of effective marketing. The Society does this through the Marketing

Society Awards for Excellence; its publications Market Leader, Our Week and rich online Knowledge Zone; a national

programme of world-class events; innovative professional development, such as the annual Marketing Leaders Pro-

gramme; and extensive on-and-ofﬂine networking opportunities.

www.marketing-society.org.uk

INSPIRING BOLDER MARKETING LEADERSHIP

Roisin Donnelly

Corporate Marketing

Director and Head of

Marketing at Procter &

Gamble UK and Ireland

By Roisin Donnelly

Foreword

Marketing excellence can drive breakthrough

business results for the short and long

term. Marketing excellence requires great

strategic thinking, great creative thinking and

perfect execution.

But how do we assess marketing excellence?

First we choose brilliant industry judges who are

all experienced and successful practitioners of

excellence and we ask them to pick out the cases

which they see as remarkable. We ask them to

look for two key qualities from our winners:

creativity and effectiveness.

But marketing continuously changes and evolves,

as consumers become more sophisticated and

demanding and the media for communicating

with them ever more diverse. So the standards

for marketing excellence change and in turn

become more demanding.

We believe that The Marketing Society Awards

for Excellence in association with Marketing set the

standard of marketing excellence in the UK. They

have established this reputation over a period of

more than 25 years, and they have always been

based on the principle of searching out the best

examples of different marketing techniques in

action, that showcase great strategic thinking,

great creativity and perfect execution.

In order to be a winner of one of the Society’s

Awards, marketers have to demonstrate that what

they have done is outstanding in comparison with

marketing in all industries not just their own particu-

lar sector.

If a marketing story has been good enough to

impress our judges, then all marketers can learn

from it – however senior they have become. The

collection of case histories brought together in

this book is the best of the best from the past four

years of our Awards, and I am conﬁdent that it truly

demonstrates marketing excellence. I have been

truly inspired by these case studies and I hope you

will be too.

What is marketing excellence?

Foreword | Marketing Excellence 2

About The Marketing Society

Marketing Excellence 2 | About The Marketing Society

People power builds a breakthrough brand

giffgaff

Key insights

s A powerful mix of entrepreneurialism and digital

dexterity enabled mobile phone operator O

create a new brand to attract a sceptical but

inﬂuential group of customers.

s This interesting new brand worked on a collective

principle of incentivising its satisﬁed customers to

recruit new ones. This emulated the mutuality

embodied in social platforms such as Wikipedia to

provide real value for customers while keeping

operating costs as low as possible.

s Developing strong bonds with customers through

this strong focus on simplicity, transparency and

rewards has been a source of continuing insight

and brand advocacy.

Summary

In late 2009 O

created giffgaff, a SIM-only mobile

network, to attract an audience of digitally-savvy

consumers who avoided traditional networks. Its

deﬁning characteristic was the application of the

community-powered model of social media sites such

as Wikipedia to the mobile sector. Based on

mutuality, giffgaff would not only offer great value,

but would reward consumers ﬁnancially and

emotionally for their contribution.

Its journey began with a beta launch in November

2009 with a collection of weird and wonderful tools

to draw in these tech-loving individuals. They could

‘hire’ these tools for free and bring them to life by

making a video which they could then upload to

YouTube. They were also incentivised to take part

with the prize of a SIM card that offered free calls,

texts and data for a year, along with cash prizes for

sharing and creativity.

Following a successful debut, the public launch six

months later was aimed at a more mainstream

audience and focused on driving word-of-mouth

through a tightly-integrated campaign. It achieved

signiﬁcant success despite its comparably small

share of voice in paid media. The brand has since

gone from strength to strength and boasts a base of

committed members who continue to act as brand

advocates by recruiting new customers.

People power builds a breakthrough brand | giffgaff | Launching New Brands | 5

Snapshot

created an iconoclastic new brand to capture a digitally-savvy

audience who rejected traditional network operators.

4 | Launching New Brands | giffgaff | People power builds a breakthrough brand

Breaking the corporate mould

When O

’s head of brand strategy Gav Thompson

attended a social media conference in San Francisco,

he was struck by what would turn out to be a

game-changing idea for the business. Inspired by the

way that platforms like Wikipedia and Facebook were

enabling new, non-institutional ways of doing things,

he imagined a mobile network run on the principle of

mutuality: one that rewarded its community of

customers for doing much of the work normally done

by employees. He could see a gap in the market for

people who liked to get involved in different ways of

doing things.

Back at head ofﬁce, the analysts concluded there just

might be a business in it. And so the idea of giffgaff

was conceived: a mobile virtual network operator

(MVNO) which would run on the O

network and be

owned by O

, but which would operate as a separate

business and target a group of consumers for whom

the O

brand had little appeal.

The ﬁrst step was to hire creative agency Albion to

help transform what was still an embryonic idea and

a rather thin business plan into a fully-ﬂedged and

proﬁtable business.

Figure 1.Cost comparisons

The brief was dauntingly broad in scope:

s Deﬁne and name the brand.

s Identify and understand the target audience.

s Design and build the web interface.

s Help develop the business strategy and process.

s Create the launch communications.

Bringing the brand to life

The name chosen for the nascent brand encapsulated

its essence: giffgaff, which is an ancient Scottish

term meaning ‘mutual giving’, but which also sounds

like it is describing a conversation: an apt metaphor

for a social mobile network.

The big challenge was how to transform the loose

principle of mutuality into a fuctional business model.

giffgaff’s association with O

meant that emotional

rewards alone might be met with scepticism, so

fuctional beneﬁt was also created: ‘Payback’,

giffgaff’s reward currency, which members could

convert into cash, credit or a charity donation. More

signiﬁcantly, these pioneering members would

provide customer service by helping new members

with queries and problems. The goal was to deliver

better and more efﬁcient service than that of the big

networks’ call centre model; one which could

therefore offer much better value (Figure 1).

giffgaff

Calls per minute Texts

Orange

T Mobile

Vodafone

giffgaff

Orange

T Mobile

Vodafone

20p

10p

25p

11p

21p 10p

25p

12p

The concept of member involvement was key to

creating a powerful value proposition. By removing

call centres and big-budget advertising campaigns,

costs would be kept low and savings passed back to

members. It would give the brand the ability to beat

the big networks on price and even match the budget

competitors, but with an interestingly differentiated

experience.

Key to giffgaff’s strategy is that it isn’t for everyone.

Freed from the need to try and attract a broad

audience, the brand could focus on creating an

experience that really connected to that substantial

niche of mobile users who weren’t being recognised

by any other operator.

Banking on people power

Accepted wisdom said that launching this type of

network would take two years. Because giffgaff

didn’t want to wait that long, it decided to adopt the

beta launch approach common with web start-ups to

get the operation up and running within six months.

But launching before the technology platform was

completely developed would only work if it could

attract enough users onto the network to give it a

good shakedown and create an embryonic

community. Moreover, a beta test requires a certain

sort of person: they need to be happy to put up with,

and accurately report, any bugs in the technology in

return for the ‘bragging’ rights of being ﬁrst in. It was

felt that those traits would be found among students,

particularly at art colleges.

The result was a campaign which kicked off in

November 2009. It was centred around the power of

mutuality and participation with the introduction of

‘Tool Hire’. This involved a collection of offbeat tools

that people could ‘hire’ for free and bring to life by

making a video using them which could then be

uploaded to YouTube.

Consumers were incentivised to take part with the

offer of a VIG (very important giffgaffer) SIM card

that offered free calls, texts and data for a year. To

promote sharing and creativity there were ﬁve prizes

of £5,000 awarded to the community-nominated

winner of categories such as ‘most viewed’,

‘funniest’ and so on (Figure 2).

Although the barriers to entry were seemingly high

– asking the public to create and upload video

content had proved too great a stumbling block for

many a bigger brand with a large existing customer

base – the results after a scant three months were

impressive:

s 156 videos.

s 615,116 video views on YouTube.

s 43,301 visits to the Tool Hire site.

s A reach of 1.2 million through primetime

TV pick-up.

More signiﬁcantly, the campaign began to lay strong

foundations for the community-powered business

model, with members proving themselves to be

effective recruiters.

The ﬁrst campaign made an impact in two

critical ways:

s It showed that a strong appetite existed for a brand

built on mutuality.

s It proved that the business model of community-

based support and acquisition worked as well in

practice as it had sketched on the back of a napkin

in San Francisco.

The community also proved to be a great source of

insight. The members loved the competitive prices as

well as the simplicity and transparency of the

offering. But they had also shown an interest in

additional products, particularly the bundled

packages of calls, texts and data. This led to the

development of ‘goodybags’, or bundles of texts,

minutes and containing everything the members liked

about other networks’ bundles without those

elements they disliked, such as ‘unlimited’ not really

meaning unlimited.

This emphasis on simple transparency proved to be a

hit and a major draw for smartphone users. But what

really created buzz and generated advocacy was the

level of consultation with members on the make-up

of the goodybags.

Moving towards the mainstream

After only six months, with the powerful combination

of a working business model, a solid base of

members poised to deal with queries and

competitively-priced products for all user types, the

time had come to leave beta.

Figure 2. ‘VIG’ SIM card campaign

To do that, a ‘hook’ was needed to win over a more

mainstream audience, particularly those who might

have been a bit bafﬂed by the concept of Tool Hire.

The launch would aim at driving online word-of-

mouth about the brand to create activity through the

low-cost acquisition channels, such as search engine

optimisation, that the business model depended on.

8 | Launching New Brands | giffgaff | People power builds a breakthrough brand

For the ﬁrst time, too, the brand was showcased

ofﬂine as well as online to help validate the service

in the eyes of this broader audience. The integrated

campaign ran across digital outdoor, national press,

online display and social media. It was based on the

concept of ‘The Man’, a representation of the

‘establishment’ way of doing the sort of things that

giffgaff and it customers were against. The caricature

tapped into the cultural rage against bankers and fat

cats in the wake of the recession and oil spills

(Figure 3).

Figure 3 ‘The Man’ integrated campaign

People power builds a breakthrough brand

| giffgaff | Launching New Brands | 9

Because the main objective was to use ofﬂine not to

drive acquisition but to create buzz, the campaign

was run for only two weeks. Despite such a

concentrated period, the results were strong.

Even more promisingly, it ignited trafﬁc in the

non-traditional channels. Search trafﬁc, for example,

was still increasing 20 days after the paid-for media

campaign ended.

Building on success

The ‘run by you’ community-powered model has

continued to ﬂourish and its success can be seen in:

s Excellent customer service. By the end of 2010

there were 8,000 questions asked with an average

of ﬁve responses to each one. Questions were

answered within an average of three minutes

compared to the industry standard of 15 minutes.

s High levels of recruitment of members by members.

s Members creating new apps, holding events,

building a wiki and even launching (and had

upheld) an Advertising Standards Authority

complaint when rival network 3 claimed that “no

other network gives you more for £10”.

s Regular mobilisation for defence of the brand: for

example, forcing the community review site

Pownum to change its business model to allow free

right of reply.

The company has also continued to improve the

offering, for example by generating buzz and

exploring new ideas in its experimental goodybags.

In addition, each member has been provided with a

unique afﬁliate page through which their own

networks can order SIMs and which includes a

selection of banners and buttons they can use across

their online proﬁles.

The community has been well-rewarded for its efforts

as well. For instance, in the November 2010 payout

the top earner received over £900, with a further top

ten earners making £450 on average. One member

was even hired to join the giffgaff team.

All images appearing in this case study are reproduced by permission of giffgaff