Brand as Rebellion Weapon

“Branding is a personal passion of mine, dating back all the way to the Bravo venture in St Petersburg, and it felt exciting and invigorating to be essentially building a start-up again. But what should we call our new baby? After discarding an initial notion to use the Play brand, we looked for a similarly dynamic name behind which to build a challenger, customer-centric culture and asked half a dozen marketing agencies to pitch their best ideas. None of them came up with anything that we liked, but another firm which had not been invited to pitch came up with a left-of-field suggestion that resonated with us straight away. Its concept was to brand the challenger around the ‘word-of-mouth’, viral way that we wanted to grow through personal recommendations offering great value and customer-centred service. ‘Word of mouth’ was shortened to WOM and that became our brand. My idea was to build a new Latin American challenger mobile telecoms brand using the playbook of Play in Poland and Nova in Iceland. I could use the same management team and external consultants who worked on both. The partners at Novator responsible for telecoms, who had worked with me since 2010, focused on financing the new venture and acquiring the necessary spectrum and telecoms licences. Chris Bannister, a personable Brit who became Play’s first chief executive in 2005 and had already lived and worked in nine countries, was brought back into the fold as chief executive. And the Icelandic chief technology officer oversaw the technical build-out design, along with his Swedish colleague. Members of our trusted teams from both countries helped in the beginning to transform a failed old-school US telecoms operator into a state-of-the-art ‘kick-ass’ mobile challenger. None of us spoke Spanish and most had never set foot in Latin America before, let alone Chile. It didn’t seem to matter. When we launched, Chile was the most expensive country in the Latin American region in mobile telecommunication, so we saw a market that was fertile for a new approach. Conventional new entrants like Nextel and a venture headed by US telecoms billionaire John Malone had failed to crack the nation. We needed to do things very differently. To achieve the maximum impact and truly disrupt the market, we knew that a key differentiator had to be price. Indeed, we priced our services so aggressively that Chile immediately became the cheapest country in South America for consumer mobile telephony. Alongside this value offer, we promoted WOM as an independent challenger offering honesty and integrity. We set out to be brave, innovative, bold and passionate.”

“To accomplish all this requires a brand to be worth talking about and recommending to family and friends, so WOM was styled with a rebellious, edgy culture that was not afraid to court controversy and wanted to be talked about. We wanted to have a genuine social impact and to resonate with the issues of the day in order to engage with customers. One of the ways we did that was to acknowledge and address the stark inequalities in Chile and highlight social impact. At the time of our launch, one of the hottest issues in the country centred on various allegations of commercial collusion to the disadvantage of customers. One such allegation involved the forestry and woodpulp industries, with claims that they were artificially inflating the price of toilet rolls, so we filmed an advert featuring someone stealing toilet rolls. Other ads targeted unrest over politics and food. One of our most successful campaigns was based around a popular Argentinian song that proclaimed: ‘You have power but you will lose it,’ to footage of a scandal alleging collusion in the Chilean fishing industry. Another focused on the empowerment of women. We wanted to expose corruption, inequalities and bad practices.”