Consumer insight pays dividends for PLDT exec

In a word, what copywriters and marketing executives around the world are looking for in crafting a memorable and effective advertising campaign is insight.

Unfortunately, this acute awareness of what the target consumers think or feel has proven to be quite elusive, which explains why some advertising campaigns strike a chord with consumers and far too many leave them cold.

One executive who has so far been able to zero in on valuable consumer insight and harness it to push products and services under his care is Isaias Ariel P. Fermin, executive vice president of telecommunications giant Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.

Mandate

His mandate is to grow the Home Business Segment of PLDT and its mobile subsidiary, Smart Communications.

This key segment covers basic landlines as well as digital subscriber lines that enable high-speed access to the Internet from home.

Fermin has been at the helm of the home business segment for just three months, but he has already been able to make a difference through the Anna Banana commercial, which has been viewed over a million times on YouTube.

The 60-second Anna Banana ad features a young boy named Derek S. Lorenzo, who filmed himself singing a song he wrote especially for his crush.

He was so happy his film clip got many hits on YouTube that he excitedly told his mother about it, not knowing that it was actually his loving mom who kept on viewing his video post, just so he would feel good about himself.

The boy and his song (Anna Banana, I love you a bunch. I’ll dance like your monkey if we go out for lunch…) enjoyed such a high recall among television viewers that the commercial, which first aired on February 11 on cable channels ETC, Diva and 2nd Avenue, helped push sales of PLDT’s DSL broadband revenues by more than 20 percent in the first two months compared with the same period in 2011.

Momentum

PLDT hopes to grow its home segment by at least 20 percent in 2012, building on the momentum built last year, when PLDT expanded its broadband subscriber base by 45 percent to over 2.9 million subscribers.

While the spike in sales in the first two months cannot be attributed to the commercial alone, the Anna Banana spot, which has since been trimmed to 30-second and 15-second editions in free television channels, was able to raise awareness of home-based telecommunications services, which have lost ground to mobile connections.

The television advertisement showed how the PLDT broadband connection helped the mother show her support to her kid.

“We already know we have a great product. The key opportunity was to market it in a way that sticks, and sell it in a way that resonates,” says Fermin, who was president of Greenwich and Chowking of Jollibee Foods Corp. before joining PLDT, and relies on both intuition and market research to arrive at that elusive insight.

“For this campaign, we humanized technology. We communicated our technology upgrades in a way that people understand. We want our consumers to get the message that the strongest connections are at home,” adds the Chemical Engineering graduate of the University of the Philippines.

That Filipinos value relationships—especially one between a mother and child—is the consumer insight around which the advertisement was created.

Fermin says that other marketing campaigns are in the works to build the home segment of PLDT, which currently accounts for about 30 percent of PLDT revenues.

Long experience

Fermin is banking on his long experience in marketing that has paid dividends for the companies he worked for.

Under his leadership, for example, Greenwich posted the highest sales growth performance among the Jollibee brands, due in part to the “Sobrang Cheesy” ads featuring actor John Lloyd Cruz, which were built around the consumer insight that Filipinos value friendship.

Fermin’s track record in his previous companies also speaks of significant contributions to the achievement of top-line and bottom-line growth.

As country director for Nike Philippines from 2005 to 2008, the company posted double-digit growths in both revenues and net incomes for 2006 and 2007.

It was during Fermin’s stint that world-class athletes like Kobe Bryant and Manny Pacquiao were included in the marketing agenda of Nike Philippines.

Before joining Nike, Fermin handled various posts in Unilever as senior executive for sales, marketing, media, and innovation process management from 1998 to 2005.

Fermin also worked in the Coca-Cola Company as category manager and was responsible for the launch of Powerade during the 1996 Olympics.

Fermin hopes to duplicate these feats in PLDT, even if telecommunications is quite a jump from food and consumer goods.

After all, says Fermin, the principle is the same: people do not buy products, they buy meanings.