Re-establishing BT’s leadership position in the UK

Challenge

CCGroup and BT developed a multi-pronged strategy to demonstrate BT’s leadership credentials across a range of areas. The first area of focus was the future, specifically the future of BT’s network. Our objective was to:

Establish BT’s network vision as the most advanced, compelling and complete in the UK

Our success would be assessed based on levels of influencer engagement and coverage of the announcement, with the aim of the story being ranked as a top positive BT Group story for the period, as measured by Kantar.

Solution

First of all, we needed to work with stakeholders across BT Group to bring together the network vision in a way that was consumable to external audiences. This meant working hand-in-hand with BT’s Consumer Network PR team to develop key messaging and content – slide decks and speaker notes, Q&As, press release, blog content etc.

With a lot of potentially dense information about deeply technical topics to share, we decided that a virtual event, combined with a long Q&A and follow-up briefings, was the best way to go. This was supported by informal conversations amongst key influencers and demonstrated BT’s commitment to both engagement and transparency.

We took the time to test the messaging and content with a handful of influencers, making subsequent adaptations to ensure the story landed well. There were a number of strong commitments – firsts in the UK telecoms sector – woven throughout: 5G connectivity solutions anywhere in the UK by 2028, a full converged network by mid-2020s and retirement of 3G services by 2023.

The event was led by BT Consumer’s CEO and BT Networks’ CTO, with a range of subject matter experts on hand for the Q&A and subsequent deep dive interviews with media and analysts.