Great branding: helping people connect with valued but intangible benefits

Brand stewardship is an exercise in managing people’s relationship with meaning. But a brand should also be considered an agent for helping connect people with value. It's one of our core activities in the work we do for Clients here at OFD.

Value of course involves far more than price: it’s all the other benefits that consumers derive from consuming a product or service – and not just in a functional or physical sense. Psychological rewards are a key part of the unconscious value assessment that people carry around in the heads and which draws them towards brands or pulls them away.

By recognized that a key element of consumer value had gone unowned in its category, Verizon improved brand differentiation and leadership significantly.

Verizon Wirelesss

SITUATION
Coverage is a big issue with cell phone users. Poor quality reception disrupts a conversation, causing frustration.

For years cell phone companies have boasted about their coverage, either the reach (national coverage maps) or the quality (like Sprint’s pin drop). It’s become a completely undifferentiated claim and consumers have no way or reason to believe one brand is better than another.

CHALLENGE
The network is an idea that’s invisible and abstract. Consumers hadn’t been connected to it, even though ironically they use it every time they make a call.

CREATIVE INSPIRATION
Root the solution in something from the consumers’ world so they can relate to the network idea better.

SOLUTION
Visual: Use the idea of the Verison workforce as a human embodiment of the network, which literally follows a verizon user around as they go about their day.
This massive group is led by a network 'tester' that roams the country testing signal strength

Aural: “Can you hear me now? Good.” recast a commonly overheard phrase people say when poor reception is hampering a conversation and turns it into positive affirmation of network coverage quality.

RESULT
Verizon's network has powerful tangible benefit to people, by using a distinctive, visual and aural branding device.