One of Europe’s largest Employee Brand engagement programmes has been created in a collaboration between SomeOne and Lambie-Nairn across the UK, Ireland, Germany, Czech Republic and Slovakia for telecoms giant Telefónica.
The project was part of Telefónica’s new global brand strategy to create one employee brand across all of its markets. Telefónica employs 260,000 people in 25 countries and is the parent company of O2 in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Czech Republic and Slovakia – as well as Movistar in Spain and Latin America, and Vivo in Brazil.
The campaign was titled ‘Did You Know?’ and was created to help Telefónica’s employees understand the brand changes on a practical and emotional level by communicating the transformation in a clear, warm and engaging way.
An iconic question mark visual made up of hundreds of different objects representing Telefónica, O2, Movistar and Vivo’s campaigns, sponsorships and charities formed the heart of the campaign. This was to represent the breadth of the Telefonica family and to ensure that employees feel they were part of something big. This visual was seen on email templates, microsites, posters, magazines, internal building campaigns and in all information packs circulated internally.
Amanda Clay, Telefónica Europe’s project leader, said: “Internally we wanted to create something special. Changing the brand internally was all about getting our employees to be proud of Telefónica and at the same time remaining passionate about O2. What we changed had to be better than what was there before across all our internal touch points. We wanted to raise the bar to prove change is for the better.”
Clay added: “The results speak for themselves. The microsite received more than 20,000 hits and over 47,000 pages of content were viewed over two weeks. The average time spent on the site across markets was two minutes, reaching a high of four minutes in some regions, demonstrating a high level of engagement with the content.”
Alongside brand workshops, manager roadshows and other launch events, the project was underpinned by four key campaigns
A European knowledge hub explaining the project in detail to employees with questions, answers and plans so everyone knew what was going on. These had localised messages and country CEO’s messages ensuring it felt locally relevant
A 10 Day ‘Did you know’ email campaign and microsite with video, animation and daily interactive quizzes. Warm and engaging stories about Telefonica and the countries in which it operates were created to change and re-enforce employees perceptions and make them feel proud
A ‘Pass it on Pack’ for managers comprising a 15 minute video, presenters pack and an ice breaker quiz for managers to cascade to their teams. This was supported by an extensive building print campaign
Sharers – an extensive network of trained project champions able to spread the message internally and support the changes.
Laura Hussey, Design Partner at SomeOne and creative director of the project, said: “It was a huge project that we brought to life via Telefonica’s brand strategy of ‘the power to transform’ through films, communications, print and digital media.”
Gary Holt, co-founder of SomeOne added ‘It’s unusual to see activity of such ambition and scale, Amanda Clay and her team at Telefónica have enabled us to pull off a rare thing — internal comms worth talking about. That adds value, and clearly makes sense. Amanda has been instrumental to this, leading from the front as well as being actively involved, which has benefited the programme enormously’.