Explaining the unexplainable: Unifying European marketing teams with one engaging approach to 5G messaging

The Story

Orange needed to reach and engage customers with their new 5G products, apps and services. Different markets had access to different products, but they needed a unified approach in how to position their offering across European markets.

If they didn’t understand customers’ needs and concerns, they’d risk wasting time, money and effort by creating messaging that wouldn’t resonate. Without a unified communication approach, they’d risk duplicating work and create inconsistent local campaigns.

We designed data-led creative messaging to communicate the new offering so they could create a step-change in how to talk to customers about 5G, and achieve their mission to become a market leader in 5G.

The challenge: Explaining the unexplainable

5G: an amazing yet misunderstood technology.

As a 5G provider, Orange needed to communicate the value of 5G, dispel myths, and show the endless possibilities for practical and fantastical uses.

Some big brands were already talking about 5G, but mainly through big PR stunts. Orange wanted to approach it differently. They wanted to show how useful 5G can be for our day-to-day lives, but also how exciting and fun too. They needed to explain the unexplainable. So they chose us following a competitive tender.

Our challenge was to work out who the potential audience was for this new proposition and how to position the Orange 5G products to them.

What we did

Learning about the audience

We used social listening to understand what confused people about 5G, and what they thought about key 5G product areas like AR, VR and gaming. From there, we created personas, user stories and customer journeys to understand the needs of different customer groups, and the nuances between different European markets.

We discovered that people didn’t really understand what 5G could do. So we needed a compelling new way to communicate its potential.

Designing a creative solution

Rather than try to sell the network capabilities, we focused on the incredible 5G-enabled experiences people can have, and developed a creative platform that communicates how 5G can help you thrive – on, and offline.

We created everything the markets needed to make it easy to adopt this new creative approach and customise it depending on their unique local needs.

Inspiring the markets

We produced an inspirational and practical content toolkit, including inspirational and practical messaging principles. Everything from attention-grabbing headlines to micro copy.

Using Orange’s Design System, we created a modular layout framework that utilises HTML components to create localised 5G landing pages, with endless configuration possibilities. So each market could easily create their own based on what 5G-related products they wanted to sell.

Why it was brilliant

We moved Orange from a place of uncertainty around how to explain the unexplainable, to a data-led, fully customisable European campaign rollout. This enabled them to communicate their offering consistently, and position themselves as a market leader in 5G.

Local marketing teams got a strong creative and completely customisable approach so they could build their own unique pages depending on their local needs and the stories they needed to tell. Without our help, each market would have done this work independently. Which would have cost more, taken more time and duplicated effort.

Orange created a step-change for how the value of 5G is communicated in the market – making it easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to see the extraordinary experiences that are possible.