• by Aaron Baar , August 13, 2014

The world of business telecommunications solutions should be less about what the solutions are, and more about how they work for the people using them. With a major rebrand of its business technology services (and a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign), Sprint is focusing less on the what, and more on the who, of business services. 

The new Sprint Business brand, which will run with the tagline “For companies with people in them,” is built around the idea that the best companies are the ones with the most engaged employees, and that removing obstacles — by embracing advanced collaboration and mobility tools —  is the best way to help drive their success. 

“We want to shine the spotlight on the challenges that [companies and employees] have everyday, and highlight the solutions,” Marin Martinovic, director of business marketing for Sprint, tells Marketing Daily. “We’re speaking more relevantly around them, not just shouting solution-centric messages.”

The brand positioning was developed with Velocity Partners, a London-based business-to-business firm that works with technology-driven companies. 

The Sprint Business brand uses as a key insight that by 2020, Millennials will make up more than half of the workforce by 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor. The concept also acknowledges how the concept of work has shifted to account for more contract and off-site work happening every day, says Tom Roberts, Sprint’s senior vice president of marketing. 

“We see Millennials making up a much higher portion of the workforce and wanting to work in different ways,” Tom Roberts, senior vice president of marketing, tells Marketing Daily. “We want to emphasize that what we are doing is helping them work more effectively and enjoy their jobs.”

Advertising behind the new brand will be distinct from it’s consumer-targeted marketing, with an “edgier” feel that shows off how the technology empowers employees. One print ad, for instance, shows 12 smaller pictures of a firm’s employees, highlighted by a larger picture of the boss, with the headline, “I work for them.” The body copy stresses, “these people carry this business on their shoulders. Every day, no matter what they are up against.”

“It’s edgier than what we’ve done in the past,” Roberts says. “It will be edgy but employee-focused, mobilizing them to do what they’re capable of.”

In addition to highly targeted television, print and digital advertising, Sprint Business has revamped its website to include new ideas about how to enable different ideas of work and a blog dedicated to subjects such as collaboration tools, mobile security, mobile workforce management and managing cloud-aware networks. Those subjects will be communicated through text reading, “Collaborate. Mobilize. Accelerate. Work this way.”

“Two-thirds of the [business technology] sales process happens before engaging with us. They do assessments and needs studies,” Roberts says. “We think what we’re doing in content management and develop will help in those earlier stages.”