Brand positioning for a leading telecom

CHALLENGE

Bring coherence and new vigour to a faded and fragmented telecoms brand.

In late 2013, LIME’s Cayman marketing team approached BB&P to explore a possible repositioning of its Cayman business.

Evolving from the monopoly-era Cable & Wireless, LIME as a brand was born in 2007. By the end of 2013, and having once dominated the market, LIME now had a horde of aggressive competitors stripping share away from pretty much every one of its lines of business.

Attempting to appeal to West Indian visual sensibility, and perhaps soften legacy monopoly perceptions, the LIME brand had become a tropical cocktail of colours and imagery. More concerning, while conveying a multiple personality, the brand communications failed to connect the audience with LIME’s single point-of-difference: its enduring position as the English-speaking Caribbean’s only fully-integrated telecommunications provider.

SOLUTION

Crucially, LIME agreed at the outset to allow us the space and time to perform a brand discovery which yielded two key insights:

First, the visual identity was effectively camouflaging LIME, its multi-coloured style blending in with the marketing landscape. Indeed, we demonstrated the potency of single-colour competitor communications against the virtual chameleon that was LIME’s brand.

Second, LIME had a powerful unfolding story to tell with two waves of investment into its Cayman infrastructure. The company was in the process of pouring millions into the roll-out of its new 4G LTE mobile and fibre internet platforms.

We had always harboured a sense of the brand’s latent latent potential (often difficult for an internal team being so close to the daily reality) but we realised it was this investment that would underpin the re-positioning of the brand as a resurgent phoenix.

Net Promotor Score (NPS) research amongst local consumers showed that LIME was poorly regarded in many areas of its service so it was unlikely that the audience would buy a ‘LIME is the greatest’ pitch. We had to get them to see LIME’s re-birth as a process that would take perhaps many months, and that their expectations would need to be carefully nurtured.

Thus ‘Upgrade Cayman’ came to life. Appealing to innate aspirations for one’s self, family, nation and for LIME as a company, the concept of an ‘upgrade’ is something that has meaning and attraction to all. An upgrade can be a thing in itself, and can be a call-to-action.

As a Big Linking Idea, ‘Upgrade Cayman’ could be connected to every marketing effort - from the roll-out of 4GLTE and Superfast Broadband, to mobile handset offers, to promo events - each effort in turn connecting to LIME’s positioning as the total telecoms provider.

New coherence was also provided by a simple but carefully considered visual style, the key component of which was the selection of a distinctive lime green as the dominant brand colour. Strong, angled layouts featured a brand lock-up coupled with unique locally-sourced imagery.

RESULTS

‘Upgrade Cayman’ quickly established itself in the Cayman market. At a stroke, LIME became not only visible but clearly once more the major telecom player. Across all its lines of business and by virtually every metric, significant improvements to sales, performance and consumer perception have been seen. So much so that while the positioning was originally intended for LIME’s Cayman business, it has now been adopted the single brand positioning in all its Caribbean markets. Truly a positioning concept with legs.