Optus comeback campaign positions the telco as customer champion

Optus is focused on customer satisfaction with a flurry of marketing activity supporting a host of new products designed to win over customers and rebuild trust in the brand.

Optus Cam Luby and Renee Garner are leading the telco’s charge to disrupt the category, win over customers and regain trust.

Optus has kickstarted its campaign to regain consumer trust and supercharge business growth through a customer-focused strategy and a series of product deals.

Optus has rolled out a series of deals across its prepaid, postpaid and home internet services including unlimited data weekends for prepaid customers and early phone upgrades. The product propositions are supported by an entertaining campaign, created by Emotive, which aims to engage existing and potential customers with the brand.

Optus head of consumer marketing Cam Luby told The Growth Agenda the objective was to be “the customer champion” in the telecommunications category by challenging the status quo.

“This campaign is all about the great product experiences that we are bringing to life with entertaining and fun marketing,” he said.

“We want to show how we are releasing people from the constraints they have felt from the category by giving them great value and great experiences, so that they can get on and do great things.

“It’s not just marketing, it’s how our product comes to life, it’s the experience you have with it, and then how that’s born in the marketing.

“We know that when we are absolutely customer focused across everything we do, that is going to have great outcomes for us. Those outcomes are going to be brand strength, increased trust, and it’s also going to be growth in our business as well.”

Optus vice-president of mobile & home Renee Garner said the propositions were the outcome of the businesses push to be “customer obsessed” and aimed to address consumer desire for value, ease and reliability from their telco.

“From our perspective, we should not be developing any propositions or any marketing that is not anchored in real customer insight and what is meaningful in our customers’ lives.

“What we’ve done is build three really compelling propositions which are anchored in this insight around value and ease, and we’re liberating customers from the constraints holding them back. It’s kind of simple, but it’s really customer champion insight led, and if we do that well, we know we’re going to make an impact on customers.”

The campaign is central to the brand’s comeback following its slump in consumer sentiment after last year’s national phone outage and the 2022 cyberattack, which left the business ranked the most distrusted brand, according to Roy Morgan.

Mr Luby said the path to rebuilding trust was centred in the businesses ability to deliver what consumers want, and he said this was already showing in the brand’s recent tracking.

“We’ve seen that over the last few months, we’ve been able to build the brand step by step, month by month,” he said. “So we feel very good about that trajectory. This is going to contribute to that in a big way.

“We’re going out there with the products that we know that people need, that means that they can get on with their lives and do the things they want to do.

“We’re also doing it in a way that’s fun and light-hearted and entertaining. So we’re giving that little spark of joy, and we’re trying to be a bit different as well.

“So, when we do all of that and we deliver for customers, one of the outcomes that we expect from that is going to be increased trust, and that’s because we’re giving people what we know that they need. We have a strong expectation of commercial growth and the continued progress of building our brand. And we’re going to see those brand trust scores moving up as well.

“So commercial growth, trust and building our brand metrics are absolutely the focus for us.”

The integrated campaign was created by Emotive with media by UM and retail by Optus internal Yes Agency. It will run across TV, digital, social, retail and out-of-home media, and includes a creative partnership with TikTok.

Emotive managing partner and head of strategy Michael Hogg predicts the campaign will disrupt the telco market.

“This campaign is delivering products that actually release people from the constraints that we’ve all accepted,” he said. Everyone on prepaid is used to having to watch your data because we’ve been taught to accept, and it takes a brand to come along and actually challenge that on a product level.

“I think Optus will reset the status quo and the market will follow at some point. This customer-focus is baked into the DNA of Optus and that’s what makes it different.”