Orange - The bigger picture

The cost saving had been identified after France Telecom’s purchase of Orange in 2000. F1 was the obvious choice to reduce costs : the first challenge for Pippa Dunn, Director of Brand Marketing at Orange, was to persuade the Board of the need to adopt a group strategy.

Sponsorship often stays below the radar, even when levels of investment suggest a higher business priority, so our first task was to collaborate with the internal communication of need.

Pippa secured a Board agenda slot, and three weeks later we pitched against the incumbent agency, and won Board approval for Redmandarin to develop a strategy for Orange internationally.

The work began, as usual, with an in-depth situation analysis of the business. Interviews with Marketing Directors, Consumer Insight and Heads of Sponsorship across 15 key markets deepened our understanding of the challenges and issues facing the business, in Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.

An interesting learning was the need for differentiation. Differentiation is always a challenge but as the market leader in many developing markets, Orange was faced with immediate competitor mimicry of any activation. The need for a totally unique platform, beyond imitation, was overriding.

A combination of secondary research and TGI (and local equivalents) was used to index the interests of Orange consumers against nationally available data and cross referenced across key markets to create a ranking of the top six or eight commonalities. We then carried out a detailed competitor analysis to be sure we could guarantee differentiation.

What emerged very clearly – back in 2002 - were the value of the two platforms of film and music. The relevance to target audience, the ability to model a good brand fit and activate locally were compelling. Most attractive of all was the lack of significant presence by any competitors, allowing us the opportunity to acquire and establish some unique properties outside of a landgrab.

The Board accepted our recommendations, presented four months later, and the next phase for us was securing internal buy-in in the face of some markets with tremendous emotional investment in their sponsorship activity.

Apart from powerful advocacy, intensive and listening consultation, and Board level support, two factors are critical for internal buy-in : a system which is transparent, and which allows flexibility at national level.

So we developed a set of selection and approval filters requiring specific information to establish clearly defined criteria for sponsorship acceptance. The Finance Director set up a committee to monitor investment in sponsorship, using these filters.

Importantly, one of the filters was that any sponsorship had to generate real business value, measurable in terms of new customers, WAP sign-up, higher tier contracts. No element of the filter related to brand perception.

The final stage was to present the strategy to CEOs in each market, along with the filters, and then rolled out to sponsorship teams through toolkits and training workshops to create a homogenous approach to sponsorship management and evaluation, and familiarise them with use of the filters. We also used the filters to audit existing activities to test strategic fit and recommend exit strategies where required

The entire process culminated in the Annual Sponsorship Summit in June 2004.

The strategy we created provided the framework for a vast number of activations, including – not least of all, Orange’s highly popular series of star audition adverts, and their innovative use of Star Wars as a marketing platform for promotions.