Brand Voice & Corporate Comms Ericsson

ericsson smart home.jpg
 
 

One brand voice, two dozen diverse target audiences,180 countries…

Challenge: Ericsson, as a global giant in mobile communications, has diverse set of target audiences. There are customers in different roles, ecosystem partners, end users, talent, journalists, industry and government stakeholders, among others. This 95K employee organization had never had a central framework for who the audiences are and how engage them. They came to us to lead this complex project.

My role: Project lead, Lead strategist, Client lead, Copywriter

I led an internal team of 5 people at my agency, and also oversaw the project inside the client organization, engaging all stakeholders and leading all parts of the process.

Actions:

  • Audit of all existing target audience material gathered from across regions and business functions

  • Extensive interviews with stakeholders across dozens of business areas and regions

  • Developed a full framework outlining target audiences (20+) and respective personas within each audience

  • Aligned key stakeholders around new framework (numerous workshops, meetings, interviews)

  • Extended the Ericsson brand tonality to better represent the brand personality and values

  • For each audience, developed tonality guidelines with sample content showing how to apply brand voice

  • Mapped where, why and how to engage each persona (channels, content, knowledge level, motivations, painpoints)

In December 2019 we deployed the new guidelines to marketers, sales teams and content creators in over 100 countries. I trained hundreds of them directly in understanding and applying them.

Result: For the first time ever, Ericsson has agreement across the organization on who their audiences are, how to engage them and how to find them. This has been a big step forward for them and allowed them to better scale and deploy content, social media campaigns, sales engagement assets, ecosystem marketing and external and internal communications. It has reduced friction between teams and regions and cut down the time spent to figure out and understand relevant personas and audiences.

As the Storytelling Lead at Seventy, I gave trainings on how to create cohesive narratives and engage a range of target audiences, and this project was a great example of how to do so within a complex, matrixed, global organization.