Orange and the Birth of ‘Share’

We began working with Orange in 2000, before the France telecom takeover and in the midst of the dot com boom. They were a fast-growing business with a great collection of talent working in their brand and commercial functions and great fun to work with. People like Jackie Lee-Joe, now Chief Marketing Officer at BBC Studios.

At the time a lot of brands were converging on a connected space. There were hardware companies like Nokia, also a really strong brand then, the mobile networks essentially acting as a ‘pipe’ for voice traffic, the early search engines prior to the dominance of Google and a whole host of content providers including people like LastMinute also creating great content and developing themselves as brands in their own right. Everyone wanted to capitalise on their assets to compete most effectively in a very fast-changing and fluid world. We worked with Orange to help decide strategically which territory they could compete in most effectively.

With the commercial team we explored partnership options, and with the brand team we worked to help to understand where and how to build relationships with partners who were the best fit with the Orange brand. The Orange brand style, tone of voice, their reputation for a slick and simple customer interface and their ability to build close and dynamic relationships with their customers set them apart.

Later, we supported the development of their ‘Share’ strategy. It was founded on the assumption that in time revenues would be primarily driven by customers sharing data content. Back then, mobile network revenues were dominated by voice traffic and the idea that data would be the future was rather revolutionary. The Orange team were pioneers; a group of very brand savvy people working in a space where possibilities seemed endless. Eighteen years on, the world has changed in a way that few could imagine it would back in 2000. We enjoyed immersing ourselves in the strategic challenges of that time and hope that our input made a contribution to a seismic shift in not only the transformation of commercial models in the sector but also in the lifestyles of so many people.