Creating an "IPhone"-like Zeitgeist with Air

We wrote this for a newsletter long ago -- it is worth repeating, so we do it here. It is about branding, connecting with customers, building experiences, and using the internet. It is about a cellular telephone service (and now, much more) called "Orange".

First, we want to tell you that Orange has just announced its "online book prize.":

At the heart of the operation: the internet Orange is calling on the know-how and strength of its audience to support the Award, ensuring a high level of visibility (18 million unique visitors per month on the orange.fr portal). The www.orange.fr/prix-orange-du-livre site also represents the focal point for literary communities that appear from time to time on the web, made up of book fans, authors and booksellers looking to express their views, exchange information, compare ideas and opinions on books…Indeed, internet users are invited to share what they have read and discover the recommendations of other book fans, including the members of the jury. Lastly, it is of course thanks to this site that internet users will be able to participate in the Orange Book Award: on the one hand, applying to be part of the jury, and on the other, taking part in the final selection of the winning work through their votes. The 2009 Orange Book Award will be given out on June 9, with a 15,000 euro prize rewarding the winner, whose work will be digitized in e-reader format and recorded as an audio book for extensive distribution.

And now, the story behind Orange:

ORANGE : A Brand Real People Buy

Big businesses. User-UNfriendly. Highly competitive marketplaces. A well-known corporate names launching a high tech company in the UK reinvented the way business was done, building its brands on customer-focused promises. A mobile phone service and an online bank “for the rest of us” demanded a new way of doing business and a brand name that reflected the user-friendly, every day use this business wanted to encourage.

Once upon a time, it was vital to create a name that said what you did: International Business Machines. Others have found it favorable to create names that mean nothing – Xerox – building the brand name to stand for a category.

Hutchinson Whampoa’s Orange (the mobile phone service) rapidly became the quintessential customer-friendly brand. With this“silly names,” Hutchinson Whampoa built a strong brand with a huge, loyal and affluent customer base.

In 1993, the mobile phone market in the UK was a competitive, noisy market. Customer perception was that mobile phones were for drug sellers, used-car dealers and yuppies. Like in the U.S., distinctions among companies were deliberately unclear, promotions focused on specs few understood and various service packages served to confuse the customers and belied the true expense in using a cellular service.

Hong Kong-based Hutchinson Whampoa intended to launch its mobile phone service in July of that year under the name Microtel. As the 4th entrant into the market, the company had adopted a “me-too” attitude, positioning its $1 billion plus investment as “just as good as” the other cellular services. UK-based Wolff-Olins, appointed to create a brand identity for the new service, produced research which showed the market was unfriendly, restrictive and had no customer focus – recommending to Hutchinson that it drop the sound-alike name and positioning and give the business a new personal dimension.

Wolff-Olins convinced Hutchinson that it must deliver a mobile phone service “for the rest of us,” in the same way that Apple brought us Macintosh and Saturn changed the way we think about buying cars. Defining a brand position called “It’s my phone,” the brand personality needed to be straightforward, refreshing, dynamic, honest and friendly…a far cry from the actual consumer experience with mobile service.

Although a sacrifice for Hutchinson, it brought the promise of the brand’s personality to life with features like not rounding up to the next minute. In order to find a name that made the personality and promise transparent, the name-creation process focused on the idea of warmth and friendliness, deciding on the color Orange.

Not the fruit Orange, but the color Orange. The color of warmth, the color of energy, the color of dawn – and importantly, a color that “read” well in every culture. At first resistant to such a “silly” name (“Silly?,” responded Wolff Olins, “like Caterpillar? Silly like Bird’s Eye?”), Hutchinson has embraced the name throughout its world.

When asked whether they would like to have dinner with the Chairman of Microtel or the Chairman of Orange, focus group customers resoundingly validated the friendly and dynamic nature of the name. The personality was carried through to the environment, to advertising, and to the website.

Although Orange was a service brand, black phones with a tiny orange square prompted customers to begin saying “I’ll ring you on my Orange.” The friendly brand identity won loyalty, persuading customers to stay on board while service was expanded to catch up to other services. Within two years, Orange had 500,000 customers, the highest revenue per customer in the market, and the lowest churn rate. The brand went from 0 – 45% spontaneous recognition in 10 weeks and to 70% unprompted awareness in two years.
Adding the brand-appropriate promotions the (now prestigious) Orange Prize for Fiction, Orange’s Chief Executive said: “Orange is a philosophy and knowledge-led organization, committed to innovation …where better does intellect and imagination meet than through books?”

Orange’s website calls it “A local brand, a universal idea” – proudly “Delivering our service to almost 90 million people around the world: The future’s bright. The future’s Orange.”