2007: BT Business, Customer Insight - Case Study

A simple insight, articulated in a fully-integrated campaign, ‘Do what you do best’, revitalised BT Business and put it firmly on the SME map.

Key insights
• The determination to make BT Business the preferred partner for the IT needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) demanded turning current perceptions of the brand — very big and only in telecoms — upside down.
• Using real-life entrepreneurs in the communications captured the emotion and passion SME owners felt about their business and positioned technology as an enabler rather than something confusing and time-consuming.
• This proved to be the catalyst for changing attitudes to BT Business, building consideration of BT Business as an IT and communications provider by a significant 24 percentage points.

Summary

BT Business is part of BT Retail, itself part of the BT Group, one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. The company was determined to become the partner of choice among SMEs for their information technology needs. But SMEs still saw BT Business as a telecommunications company that was too big to be relevant to them.

BT Business had to shift perceptions convincingly enough to grab the attention of these companies and become the preferred partner in a market worth £24.4 billion. Previous campaigns had achieved some increase in consideration of BT Business beyond telecoms but this had reached a plateau. A step change was needed. The resulting fully-integrated campaign using real entrepreneurs was a resounding success. Based on the insight that these customers wanted to pursue the passion that had taken them into business in the first place rather than worry about IT, it positioned BT Business as the best partner in finding the right solutions.

The campaign delivered impressive results — in particular, the rise in spontaneous brand consideration in IT and communications, which shifted from 33% to 58% in just over one year. It also increased positive perceptions of the BT brand overall.

Understanding the market basics

Technology was proving a double-edged sword for small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs). On the one hand it promised real commercial opportunities. On the other, it threatened to confuse and destabilise them. There was a world of lT applications and services that SMEs felt vaguely aware of but they didn’t know where to start. The proliferation and convergence of services being offered by multiple providers were understandably causing these businesses to question whether they were making the right decisions, or who was best placed to help them.

Becoming the SME’s first choice would prove highly lucrative to BT Business in a fiercely competitive market worth £24.4 billion. It would enable the company to retain existing customers, increase average revenue per user and acquire
new customers.

To seize this opportunity, the company needed to address three significant problems:

• SMEs still saw BT Business as just a telecoms and broadband supplier. Therefore the challenge was to make them sit up and take notice of what BT Business could do for their business.
• SMEs did not find lT interesting, so they didn’t spend much time thinking about or researching it unless something went wrong. This was a drain on resources, both in terms of costs and people.
• Sales people were coming up against scepticism among SMEs that BT Business could handle their IT needs.

Due to years of heritage and personal experience, SMEs still thought of BT Business as the big, reliable telco supplier. This was going to be a difficult perception to shift. Previous campaigns had achieved some increase in consideration of BT Business beyond telecoms, but this had reached a plateau. Figure 1 shows broadband consideration before the new campaign, where ‘advanced’ are mid-sized companies and ‘complex’ are larger organisations with more than 100 employees.

Choosing the best approach
Three key objectives were identified:

• Shift perceptions of BT Business from a telco to an IT and communications supplier.
• Create empathy with SMEs to show how BT Business could become an enabler, freeing them up from lT hassle.
• Generate a platform for change within the business itself.

The decision to make a step change in how SMEs saw BT Business meant that the company had to act very differently. The pillars of this new approach were:

a) Base everything on what the customers were interested in.
b) Seamless campaign integration.

A qualitative research programme found that, despite their self-professed distinctiveness, there were two common insights that applied to all SMEs. First, it took time, expertise and resources they didn’t have. Just because lT and communications were important didn’t mean they wanted to focus on them. So an approach that thrust technology in the face of SMEs wasn’t going to work if BT Business wanted to be seen as a true partner.

Secondly, behind all stories of the tough times SMEs were having, what characterised them all were the passion, focus and dedication that it takes to succeed in small business. lf the company was to make a real connection with SMEs, it needed to capture this emotion and passion of being in business. No one re-mortgaged their house or put their children’s inheritance on the line to worry about their broadband lines. They did it because they had a vision.

Based on these two insights, BT Business saw an opportunity to play a genuinely useful role in helping SMEs. This would not be about the big company telling the little company how to do business. But it could be about acting as an enabler to their business success and become, for them, the company that looks after their IT and communications needs so that they could get on with what they loved about being in business.

Finding the perfect solution
The company decided to mount a major communications campaign to signify to the whole SME community (and not just BT Business customers) and its internal staff that BT Business was deadly serious about this major transformation.

A range of ideas was developed and tested with customers. Ultimately, the assertion that BT Business can help you ’Do what you do best’ was seen as a perfect short cut to the insight, expressed in customer language. Research found the ‘Do what you do best’ message was one that resonated in the hearts of all SMEs, being a powerful distillation of what they all fundamentally believe business success to be about.

It also struck the right note with the internal audience. BT Local Businesses, the principal channel to market for the target audience, saw it as expressing something that was important to their customers and as an aspirational statement about their own role. So they also recognised how this insight could turn sales conversations from being product-led to customer-led. Again, research found that for BT Business staff, this focus on success implied that ‘helping business work’ is what it did best. The result was real staff buy-in to an idea that enhanced the offer and empowered them to become valuable service providers.

Resonating with the audience

The best embodiment of this idea was to feature real-life successful SME owners who had worked their way up, had a genuine passion for business, were known as hands-on types and were growing and innovating.

The launch work, for example, featured Michelin-starred chef Gordon Ramsay, and was a general repositioning statement, supported by specific product messages (Figure 2). The second phase used Dragons’ Den star Peter Jones and showed how BT Business could liberate SMEs from IT ’gremlins’ through 24/7 support and broadband reliability (Figure 3). This insight-driven approach was very different from the previous ‘digital networked economy’ campaign which centred on pushing products rather than trying to create a brand pull.

The £18.2 million above-the-line campaign redefined the position of BT Business in the minds of SMEs. TV, press, radio, and online advertising were supported by a microsite on bt.com, where the navigation was based on customer need and added depth of meaning to how BT Business really could help customers ‘Do what they do best’. The campaign focused on reasons-to-believe provided by the IT manager proposition: a breakdown recovery service for IT which got the SME back to doing what it did best quickly. This was backed up by significant direct and electronic direct marketing.

Public relations (PR) was also a key pillar, with the development of major platforms such as Small Business Week, where customers were given the tools and advice they needed to do what they did best. But ’Do what you do best’ was not just a communications campaign. It came alive in an innovative content programme which included a number of new offerings:

• Upload, a free offline and online magazine giving SMEs access to successful peers and industry experts who could help them get more out of their businesses.
• This publication was supported by Business lnsight — an online tool providing guidance to SMEs based around what they wanted to achieve in their business (for example, move or grow it).

In addition, a completely new approach to the internal audience was adopted, with sales staff included as an integral part of the campaign launch. This led to the development of the online and offline ‘Customer Dialogues’ programme, which enabled the front-line sales teams to have customer-led conversations to help SMEs choose solutions that enabled them to ‘Do what they do best’. In parallel to this, and to encourage adoption of the solutions-selling approach, a new communications programme, ‘4Sales’ was launched with the sales community.

This campaign was supported with internal communications engaging all 3,000 of the BT Business audience by explaining how they were critical to proving that BT Business could help customers ‘Do what they do best’. Humorous viral featuring the BT Business managing director enabled the company to engage staff with the message. This was followed up with a booklet explaining how BT Business values could help staff customers ‘Do what they do best’.

Reaching new heights of performance

As this was a repositioning campaign, the company focused on three principle sources of evaluation to track against its objectives:

1. Awareness and consideration of BT Business as a supplier of IT and communications.
2. Engagement with BT Business.
3. Staff engagement.

Underlying those objectives there was a series of key performance indicators (KPIs) based on pre-campaign tracking and business advertising benchmarks.

The campaign proved to be an extraordinary success, exceeding every one of its pre-set KPls — in some cases by a factor of 10. Not only did spontaneous brand awareness (SBA) in IT and communications rise from 51% to 68%, but the most impressive result was the rise in spontaneous brand consideration (SBC), which shifted from 33% to 58% in just over one year, a significant achievement for an established brand such as BT Business (Figure 4).

Table 1 shows the actual results achieved against all key performance indicators (KPI).

The campaign also proved to have a fundamental effect on perceptions of the BT brand as a whole. Figure 5 demonstrates the increases in brand attributes across the board.

Increased awareness, consideration and favourability resulted in action. In tracking, 18% of SMEs claimed they had taken action as a direct result of the campaign (either talked to a colleague or contacted BT Business). The power of the campaign was also demonstrated through the fact that the sales people were enabled to have more and better conversations with customers. In February 2008, the company interviewed the managing directors of half the local business base to gauge the impact of the campaign:

• 18/32 had had more enquiries since the campaign started.
• 24/32 said that businesses were interested in finding out more about the company’s IT services as opposed to calls, lines and broadband.

Positive staff response

The following quotations reflect how positively the campaign was received internally:

• “Customers are more open to hearing about what additional services we offer in the IT space.”
• “It means improved credibility when speaking to customers.”

A correlation was also found between the spending on this campaign and broadband market share — crucial to growth.

The campaign helped bolster broadband consideration dramatically which, in turn, increased market share (Figure 6).

Making the most of PR

The accompanying PR push also bore significant fruit. The campaign — in the spirit of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery — was spoofed by Rory Bremner, who showed Gordon Ramsay being distracted from what he does best by the pressures of running a multi-million pound business, not to mention starring in a BT ad.

Integrated PR platforms were also conceived to extend the campaign to the media, customers and other stakeholders.

• The BT Business Experience was a week-long media, analyst and customer event held in London. As a physical manifestation of BT Businessenabling businesses to do what they do best, customers could discuss with key BT Business representatives the challenges they faced and experience ‘live’ zones demonstrating BT Business services and their potential impact on their ability to compete and thrive. The event attracted over 1,000 customers and generated over £30 million in sales leads. Key media announcements surrounding the event, including the launch of the Peter Jones ads, attracted media coverage at an advertising equivalent of over £3 million. The event was translated into an online virtual tour, and became an enduring and valuable brand asset.
• Small Business Week brought together a coalition of public and private sector organisations, committing publicly to championing SMEs in the UK and enabling them to do what they do best. Over 350 pieces of media coverage, with 5.5 hours of broadcast coverage on launch day (advertising equivalent value of over £3.5 million) were generated along with whole-hearted support from a myriad of public and private sector stakeholders, including the-then Conservative Party enterprise spokesman Mark Prisk MP, who set out new VAT policies for small businesses at the event.

Crucially, not only did the campaign help reposition the brand for the future, but it has also had a short-term effect in terms of boosting BT’s ‘business as usual’ product advertising. There was an increase of 20% in terms of response to the direct marketing activity while the campaign was on air. Meanwhile, as consideration rose, cost per response (CPR) to online advertising dropped by 30% and to press by an even more impressive 50%. Of course, other factors affect cost per response like the economy, competitive activity, refined media selection and the quality of the offer itself, but the trend was marked and consistent enough to imply a clear correlation.

That this was achieved for such an established brand and one associated ‘just‘ with telecoms, highlights the power of the ‘Do what you do best’ idea — an idea that grew far beyond a tagline to become the central organising idea for the whole company.

For more info visit BT's insight page.