A used toilet paper roll, a rock and some chewed gum—all good enough to get consumers a new wireless SIM card from Public Mobile.
The brand’s new #SIMSwap campaign from Cossette aims to entice contract-leery consumers away from the bigger, more expensive wireless carriers, to the lower-cost, no-commitment Public Mobile service.
The premise of #SIMSwap is that customers can trade literally anything they don’t need for a Public Mobile SIM card. People take a picture of something they don’t want or need, post it on Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #SIMSwap and tag @PublicMobile, or post the photo to Public’s Facebook wall. Public then contacts the consumers with a URL to order their SIM card.
Public says customers get to “save money,” while it can use the otherwise useless items in ads, like this one:
This one:
And, this one:
“This is a way to raise awareness of what Public has become… and really do it in a fun and cheeky way,” says Dave MacLean, director with Public. Consumers can also just buy a card for $10 and get that money back in the form of a rebate once they activate their plan.
The key brand message is Public Mobile is “wireless done differently,” says MacLean. “Everything we do is just different.”
Public Mobile targets younger consumers 18-30 who aren’t interested in spending a lot of money for the newest and most expensive hardware, he says.
“They actually do a little bit of investigation of how to get a deal. We like to call them life-hackers,” he says. These are the customers who are okay getting hand-me-down phones from parents, buying second hand online or even trading something they no longer need for something they do.
That insight was the genesis for #SIMSwap, and underlies how Telus has built and positioned Public.
It’s for customers willing to do without some of the traditional offerings of bigger providers, like call centres and stores, to interact with the brand in what MacLean calls a “community based support model.” Customers do everything online including helping other customers in return for reductions in their monthly bills.
After Telus acquired the brand late in 2013, 2015 saw the relaunch of the brand as low-cost, low commitment option for wireless customers. Here’s how MobileSyrup described the reintroduction of the brand:
To keep costs low, Public will avoid retail store overhead and device inventory, offering only a bring-your-own-phone (BYOP) strategy with low-cost plans and SIM cards. The carrier will run off Telus’ 4G LTE network and bank on building a community of experts to build out its services, rewarding them for doing so.
In 2015, the focus was on “building out the foundation” of the model, said MacLean. Inviting customers in to first establish a community of customers before shifting the focus to raising awareness with a larger audience this year.
The campaign soft launched in June, but is being supported now through paid advertising including social buys, some premium inventory and influencer outreach.
