Today we’ve given birth to giffgaff.
It’s a new model within the mobile phone market inspired by internet phenomena like Wikipedia, where people work together to achieve things better and cheaper than big companies can.
We call it people-powered.
Because giffgaff’s customers do some of the work, they can keep their costs low. And the more customers get involved, the more they get back. Customers can get involved in many different ways, such as referring a friend, voting on business decisions, or answering questions on the customer forum. In return they will be rewarded with up to a 100 per cent rebate. Or if they just want to use the service without worrying about it, they can as it will run on the O2 network.
The idea came from Gav Thompson, one of the O2 brand team and a friend of the giffgaff CEO Mike Fairman’s. He was very excited about the possibilities of a potential new business model, and together they thought it would be
great to apply the principles of web culture to a mobile network operation. The O2 board who loved it and decided it was strong enough to become a company in its own right.
We’ve been involved from soon after the inception of the business, working on the business strategy as well as the naming, web design and usability, comms planning and brand strategy. We’ve had a dedicated war-room within the agency as even people here not working on the business haven’t been able to know anything about it.
Over the course of the launch we’ve been working in partnership with Splendid Communications, SomeOne and Zenith.
The SIM-only service will launch fully before Xmas and we’ll be doing some great people-powered comms for it. Until then you can find out more about us at giffgaff.com
Or read more about the launch at Campaign , Marketing Magazine or via a load of blogs and Twitter accounts that have picked up on the story:
- http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2009/09/meeting-with-giffgaffs-management-team-thoughts-and-a-possible-way-ahead.html
- http://www.techdigest.tv/2009/09/britain_gets_a.html
- http://www.21stcenturyfix.org/2009/09/wwwgiffgaffcom.html
- http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2009/09/giffgaff-is-the-uks-newest-mvno.html
- http://ashleynorris.posterous.com/britain-gets-a-new-web-driven-mobile-phone-ne
- http://www.ipodbuffet.com/?p=16820
- http://www.slashgear.com/giffgaff-uk-mvno-announced-is-mutual-giving-a-business-model-2357761/
- http://thetechnologeek.com/giffgaff-uk-mvno-announced-is-%E2%80%9Cmutual-giving%E2%80%9D-a-business-model/
- http://mireview.wordpress.com/2009/09/23/giffgaff-is-the-uks-newest-mvno/
- http://gadgets.geekstream.info/2009/09/23/giffgaff-uk-mvno-announced-is-%E2%80%9Cmutual-giving%E2%80%9D-a-business-model/
- http://search.twitter.com/search?q=giffgaff
