Ditch the big shows and stars and focus on benefits, advises Fetch’s marketing director
How does a brand's marketing cut through in a crowded marketplace when most of its customers come through resellers? Fetch’s marketing director, Sue Brenchley, explained the strategies and reasoning behind the subscription TV service rebranding at the recent Mumbrella Entertainment Marketing Summit.
With 85% of its customers coming through internet providers, subscription TV service Fetch has to approach its marketing differently. Doing so includes ditching celebrities and big name shows in its advertising and focusing on the brand’s benefits.
Fetch TV’s Sue Brenchley: ‘The days of $100 a month subscriptions are all gone. Telco is king’
An important myth Brenchley dispels is that Fetch is competing with Foxtel for subscribers: “Our target audience middle aged women with kids, super broad but just not Foxtel customers. If you have Foxtel in your life and you’re happy with it then Fetch isn’t for you. We’re after the other 70%.”
“You have to be the first and only remote that people pick up when they get home. Don’t give them a reason to have to go anywhere else. We believe in more of less, we only integrate content that has broad appeal, we’re not looking to be a connected TV widget with a thousand apps, we just want the ones that the most people love and we want to deliver excellent appearances.
“We believe the future of pay TV is light with free-to-air at the core. The days of $100 a month subscriptions are all gone. Telco is king.”
That market is largely still using free-to-air TV, which is what Fetch focuses on, says Brenchley: “At the heart of our product is free-to-air, if you’re going give people something they’ve already got then make it better. Catch up TV and recording. Make it easy to timeshift and then you start adding things around that including transactions like renting movies, buying TV shows and adding on channel packs.
“Anything you can do on the TV, you can do on our app. So our articulation of our product proposition is ‘all your entertainment in one place’. You start with free-to-air and then what you want.”
A challenge for Fetch’s marketing is that 85% of its customer base comes through its internet provider and telco resellers.
“We partner with telcos, we provide them with a turnkey IP-TV. We partner with 50% of the market, basically anyone not called Telstra,” Brenchley said.
“They have high value broadband and mobile customers and they have multiple touch points with those customers. More entertainment is sold through the customers every day than through any other provider.
“Fetch is designed to help ISPs acquire and retain customers, it’s not the tiny bit of entertainment margin they make on top of Fetch, it’s how our product helps make the NBN sexy.
“Everyone says ‘it’s a ubiquitous product, it’s the same everywhere’, so you can differentiate on speed, price or inclusion. TV is a pretty exciting inclusion.
“The value of a broadband customer is massive, and they don’t want to lose them
“So Fetch was engineered to a price point that can be bundled to enable ISPs to include in a broadband or phone bundle so we had to keep the price low.
“Even though we have lots of ISPs selling our product, they can differentiate their bundles by what they choose to include.”
“When you think about ISPs and their touch points – call centres, online and retail stores, the number of people changing house each day or signing up to the NBN. They have this massive reach and it costs no more to put Fetch on the side of a bus than it does to just advertise broadband. So we get advertising efficiencies.”
Fetch though decided to take more control of its branding and customer acquisition with the aim of getting ISPs customers to start asking for the service: “Moving from a push: do you want Fetch with that bundle?, to pull, where customers ring up and ask ‘I want the bundle with Fetch’.
“We decided we wanted to take this thing for a run, the truth is Fetch had low awareness, understanding and consideration. We know there’s a clear correlation between understanding and consideration but most people don’t know what Fetch is and why they should want it.”
One of the things Brenchley emphasised in the campaign was the brand’s name, using it as a verb and repeating it often along with use or ordinary people in adverts.
Brenchley is emphatic that big brand campaigns for streaming and pay TV services featuring content or celebrities don’t work as they usually don’t cut through the market, and at best promote the star or the show.
“We wanted people to see our ads and say ‘Fetch makes my TV better’ or ‘Fetch will be better for my family,” says Brenchley.
Ultimately the campaign delivered an increase in the awareness of the brand: “We started the campaign with a spontaneous awareness of nine, aiming to get to 40 and we’re currently at 35. Prompted, we’re almost there at 75. Understanding is stubbornly hard to move.”
