Virgin territory for B2B telecoms

The relaunch of NTL Telewest Business as Virgin Media Business is exciting for the B2B space – not least because we don’t get to witness B2B campaigns with ‘seven figure’ budgets very often. A month long, the campaign features a humorous broadcast-quality ad featuring the ‘IT guy’ as a hero for having chosen Virgin Media Business, and a variety of out-of-home, online and trade press ads.

The strapline for the newly created Virgin Media Business brand reads ‘Powerful business stuff’ – as opposed to Virgin Media’s ‘powerful stuff’. So no great leap from its consumer sibling, yet it was over three years ago now that Virgin Media was launched. Why the wait?

Virgin puts the delay down to ‘timing and operational reasons’. “It’s been quite a strange journey,” admits George Wareing, head of strategy and marketing communications at Virgin Media Business. “We wanted to rebrand three years ago, but Virgin Media was just launching and the focus was on shaking up consumers.”

The delay was largely down to the “focus” of the organisation, he says, which needed to “get the consumer part right”. “We have a different audience and a focus on public sector organisations, so it’s not so much about shaking things up as being trusted and reliable,” he says.

An operational challenge
NTL also had public perception issues surrounding customer service – and although these centred around its consumer division, such a stigma was surely hard for the B2B division to avoid. NTL Telewest Business had been working on its service thresholds for three years prior to the rebrand, says Wareing, ensuring its call centres were onshore, for example, and giving each customer a pin number and a dedicated account manager.

“Over the past few years we’ve spent £10 to £12 million on provisioning,” he says. “The minute you operate under a Virgin brand, expectations about service shoot through the roof.”

Wareing also explains that Virgin licenses its brand to companies and that, if you operate under the brand, you’re bound to SLAs regarding service and reliability.

Behind the scenes, NTL Telewest Business had been focused on customer retention, as opposed to acquisition work, adds Chris Bagnall, managing director, EMEA at Virgin Media Business’ media planning and buying agency, DWA. “We’ve been doing a lot of internal DM,” he says. “We hadn’t done any big brand, above-the-line work for 18 months.”

B2B marketing commentators believe Virgin’s reasoning behind the perceived delay is valid. Yet Chris Wilson, managing director at marketing agency Earnest says, “My belief is that there was a strong feeling within NTL that the Virgin brand wouldn’t work for business; that business decision-makers wouldn’t take it seriously.”

He adds, “I think it’s taken a long time because they’ve done it properly. The experience when you interact with Virgin Media Business online is coherent, the website is not just a front cover.”

Questioning assumptions
Wilson – and others – believe that the launch is interesting for the B2B market as a whole, because it questions the belief that you have to market differently to businesses. “People still react emotively in business. I think the assumption that the Virgin brand wouldn’t work in a B2B context is due to outdated perceptions.”

Many other B2B marketing experts agree. According to Robert Mighall, consultant at Radley Yeldar, “B2B audiences are still people. Very few business brands act on that.

“Yet they’ve managed to recreate the Virgin language and lose the business jargon where they need to. They’ve thought about it and they’ve chosen an appropriate language,” he says. “People know what Virgin is about. It’s no longer a ‘punk rebel’, it’s grown up.”

Virgin is unique, say commentators, in that the public really understands what its brand stands for – innovation, fun, questioning assumptions doing things differently. This will make it easier, they say, for the brand to make its first clearly delineated move into business territory.

“I wouldn’t necessarily describe Virgin as a lifestyle or a consumer brand,” says Evan Ivey, planning director at Gravity. “I see it as a brand that takes on a category and does something interesting with it. Virgin Airlines, for example, is as much a business offer as a consumer offer. I think they can straddle both camps.”

Ivey describes this as ‘permission-based’ marketing and says that some – trusted – brands have permission to offer more than others, citing Tesco’s move into finance as an example. “Virgin has built up customer affection, trust and permission,” he says. “There is an expectation that it will improve and deliver. Too many other brands are category brands.”

Whether or not the very public spat with Sky over content distribution costs was another reason behind the delayed rebrand is speculation, but many branding experts agree that launching a new B2B proposition whilst the squabble was ongoing could have been risky. Debbie Spence, a brand planner at UffindellWest comments, “To launch a brand you want lots of positivity. But I’d be more inclined to believe that any delay had more to do with the infrastructure. In this market, it’s mission critical to deliver.”

A change of tone
Like Mighall, Spence also believes that Virgin has done a very good job of applying its own language to the business space. Having seen the tube card panels, she comments, “I noticed the use of more formal, business language. It’s a bit different to Virgin’s more consumer-led fun and irreverant tone, but I think they’ve made this differentiation quite well.”

She too believes that Virgin Media Business will benefit from its parent company’s brand ‘halo’ and that jumping from consumer to business categories is not a leap too far for the brand. “Our lives are so blended now. We live in a world of on-the-go media. I’d say the lines between business and consumer are more blurred than they were,” she says.

Whilst the effectiveness of the campaign will only be determined by results, Virgin’s claim that the delay was down to getting its infrastructure right rings true. What happens now depends on how far Virgin Media Business can reassure NTL Telewest Business’ existing customer base about the benefits of the new brand, and how far it can take on BT Business’ current stronghold.

“If they do get this right, it’ll probably stand in their favour that they are not viewed as massively corporate as a brand,” adds Birddog MD Scott McKee. “Like Apple, Virgin is viewed as a brand which does its own thing, which ploughs its own furrow – not about comparisons with others.”

“I would suggest that any baggage from NTL is financial and operational. Assuming that’s covered, they should be ready to go.”

A survey or crystal ball?

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