The client
plan.com is a UK business mobile network. As a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), it runs on the infrastructure of two of the UK’s leading networks and wraps that connectivity in its own management platform, my.plan. The platform gives businesses real-time control over their mobile fleet, including usage, spend, location and security. More than 750,000 users are managed through it.
Most of plan.com’s growth had come through a network of third-party partners who sell its contracts. It serves everyone from sole traders to large enterprises across every sector.
The challenge
plan.com came to Hallam looking for a full-service retainer. A creative campaign was a key part of that brief, and our creative capability was a deciding factor in winning the pitch.
What quickly became clear was that plan.com had built a strong business without really building a well-known brand. Because so much of its sales had come through partners, the brand work had stayed on the back burner. Its website was relatively new, only a handful of pages deep, and the company had yet to refine content and messaging it was fully happy with. Being relatively new visually, it also had few distinctive brand assets – cues that could be used in advertising beyond its logo.
That gap in brand recognition had a real commercial cost. Our research found out that some customers who signed up through a third-party partner cancelled almost straight away, because they didn’t recognise the name on the contract. plan.com was losing customers before the relationship had even started.
They were also up against some of the biggest and most iconic names in the country. In business mobile, the default choice for most companies is Vodafone, EE or O2 – iconic names – and plan.com had almost no visibility or equity next to them. There were further constraints too. Competing on price was off the table, because that would undermine the partners plan.com still relied on. Any new positioning had to strengthen those relationships while giving plan.com’s own sales team something to take to market directly.
What we did
Research first
Rather than going straight to creative, we started the partnership with substantial brand strategy work. We first ran a series of extensive interviews with plan.com’s team and analysed dozens of customer call transcripts, CRM data and existing case studies, to quickly understand how customers actually experienced the category.
Business mobile is not a category people typically love or think about much, but the research showed there are genuine moments when it matters, and those moments became defined as plan.com’s Category Entry Points.
The most powerful Category Entry Point was bill shock, which also made up one of plan.com’s largest behavioural segments – when business users had thought about the category first after an unexpectedly large cost to the business. Picture a sales director who comes back from a work trip abroad to a four-figure roaming charge nobody saw coming. That is the moment companies realise they have no visibility or control over their mobile spend – and plan.com’s platform is built to solve exactly that problem. No surprises.
The timing made it even more relevant. The UK’s biggest networks were facing class-action litigation over how they billed and charged customers, so billing transparency was already part of the cultural conversation. For a B2B brand, finding a cultural hook like this is unusual.
The research also brought an internal tension to the surface. Was plan.com a technology platform, or a business defined by its customer service? Buyers give a brand only a few seconds of thought, so it couldn’t lead with both and after working through it with the leadership team, plan.com chose to position itself as a technology company first. That is what it excelled at, where its real advantage lies.
While the strategy took shape, the insights were already shaping the everyday work. Our copywriter used them to sharpen plan.com’s messaging, so the research was improving live activity well before the creative platform was signed off.
A new era of business mobile
With the strategy agreed, the creative challenge was clear: give a brand with little visibility something to stand for, and tie it to advantages it could legitimately claim.
plan.com’s platform has real technical advantages over the big networks. For example, customers can see updated usage data within 15 minutes, compared with a 48-hour wait elsewhere in the category. The big networks sell handsets, minutes and data. plan.com gives businesses visibility of their people, their productivity and their costs.
So we set out to reframe the conversation. Business mobile shouldn’t be seen as a phone contract. It should be a business asset that drives productivity and efficiency. The creative needed to make plan.com feel like the start of a new era of business mobile, and make the established networks feel dated by comparison, without ever attacking them directly.
The creative platform: More than mobile
After exploring several concepts, we landed on a platform built around one idea: with plan.com, you get more than mobile. It rests on three pillars.
More value. plan.com isn’t the cheapest option, and it doesn’t need to be. The productivity gains and cost control it provides mean businesses get more for their money.
More visibility. plan.com gives businesses access to data the big networks hold but don’t share, including usage, location, app-level activity and spend. That means businesses can see costs before they spiral.
More human. plan.com doesn’t do off-the-shelf plans. Every package is tailored to the client, and the team is proactive and accountable, often fixing issues before a customer notices them.
The line “built to move businesses forward” sits underneath the platform, and bold typographic executions carry the idea into the world: More than minutes. More than data. More than devices. More than mobile.
Turning a full stop into a distinctive brand asset
With no distinctive assets to build on, we looked at what plan.com already owned. Working closely with its in-house team, we picked up an idea they had explored but never developed: the blue full stop in the plan.com logo.
We gave that full stop meaning. It became “the orb”, a visual metaphor for the visibility the platform provides. In the executions, the orb traces an employee’s route on a business trip, marks where a team is, and signals that people abroad are safe. In video, it moves, changes size and tracks activity. It turns an abstract platform feature into something people can see.
Where the orb itself couldn’t appear, we hinted at it. We developed a photography style built around blue light. Screens glow blue as someone picks up their phone, and soft blue light spills across an office or a face. It suggests plan.com’s presence in someone’s working day, always shown positively, and keeps people at the centre of the imagery in line with the “more human” pillar.
We then brought the strategy’s entry points to life. For bill shock, we developed a full campaign concept that uses bold typography and striking imagery, such as shock absorbers on plan.com blue. It looks and sounds nothing like the rest of the category.
From insight to idea
The brand platform shows the value of doing things in the right order. We started with the evidence, agreed the strategic direction with the client, and then built creative that followed directly from it. Because plan.com had signed off each stage, the final creative was grounded in facts it already agreed with rather than subjective opinion.
The result was a brand platform plan.com’s team was genuinely enthusiastic about. It gave plan.com a clear position, a distinctive visual identity and a toolkit to go to market on its own terms against the biggest names in UK telecoms.
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