Building customer and company awareness of global power network provider’s end-to-end service offering.
The ABB Service Team are responsible for supporting the company’s extensive power grid products across the globe. The team came to Make Studio looking for help driving towards the growth targets of their Service offering. Already enjoying double-digit growth since our first campaign together in 2015, ABB wanted to continue this trajectory with a focus on selling their new range of services, launching in 2019. The new campaign was to focus on their external story to build customer retention, creating awareness of their remote and advanced services.
ABB saw this campaign as an opportunity to create a visual identity of the services that, by their nature, were particularly intangible. With an ambition to meet a KPI of 300 new service agreement contracts in 2019, we knew we needed to apply an emotionally creative focus to the work. It was equally vital to employ a simplified communication tone to better connect this complex service offering with a new audience.
Our Grid Automation Service campaign video shot in Switzerland
For a worldwide power network leader
For decades ABB has pioneered the development of advanced protection, supervision, control and management products and systems across the power delivery process. As the leading global network provider for power supply, ABB is able to optimise integration in both primary and secondary distribution.
With growing complexity of their systems offering, the ABB Service Centre pro vide an essential service, maintaining software, hardware and security through a 24/7 maintenance service, and via a network of ABB engineers and a remote expert escalation centre.
To pinpoint a mission
We began by researching the needs of ABB’s customers and the in-house sales team to ensure we had the content required to capture imaginations and enable the awareness process. Customers vary from transportation systems – rail, air and road and city power grids, to critical communications and micro-grids. ABB Sales Teams needed to communicate to a variety of persona types, identified within our immersive insight phase, and needed to be equipped with the best communication tools for face-to-face meetings with new clients.
In line with ABB’s ‘We Are With You’ story, underpinning their employee engagement, and with respect to the previous customer-facing campaign message ‘Protection For Your Investment’, we created a mission statement that underpins the purpose and drive of the extensive Service offering – ‘Better Together’.
Better Together epitomises the ABB technical support team. This team are on hand for all their customers needs, with critical expertise available 24/7, giving customers access to human-to-human interaction when they need it.
Through intuitive digital animation
Using our Inspire, Involve, Inform methodology, we repositioned the communication focus away from pure technology and put people at the centre of the campaign. Communications began by establishing an emotionally connecting narrative through an engaging influencer film. Including an ABB spokesperson as the ambassador, and introducing the new service offering, this creates an authentic and personal approach that reflects the bespoke ABB service. The film was shot in Switzerland and follows the customer journey from the Oerlikon substation. It shows an ABB service engineer engaging with the client and allowing a superior technical engineer to remote access to further assist. We felt an interactive digital piece would better help to inform website visitors but would also serve as a valuable asset within exhibitions and events, empowering the sales team in face-to-face situations.
This highly interactive piece involved a complex digital build using REACT software, with supporting animations and imagery built by Make. The animation allows users to explore the various, and extensive, offerings of the ABB service level agreements in a non-linear, user-driven way. This visualisation of ABB’s huge service set allows users to discover for themselves, building up an understanding of the process through a non-prescriptive, intuitive path, with complex services broken down to clear and simple descriptors.
The wider campaign of print and digital assets included brochures, digital banners, exhibition graphics, email campaigns, as well as sales enablement activities including webinars and talks.
Captures the imagination
A phased campaign launch began in late 2018 in line with the inauguration of ABB’s Collaborative Operation Centre in Switzerland. This saw the interactive service tool being utilised for the first time alongside wall graphics that, together, established a visitor demonstration zone at the Centre. The tool is now being utilised in sales meetings across the globe , helping to communicate the complex and tailored offering that ABB bring to their customers. The second phase of the rollout began in May 2019 with an email campaign, driving traffic and captivating attention with the service tool. The Better Together message is now unified across all divisions and continues to strengthen ABB’s solid partnership message.
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