Blyk Marketing

MVNO activity has been hotting up in the UK during the past year with a number of offers in the pipeline particularly in the curiously uncrowded area of youth specific mobile offers. One of the more interesting projects is the launch of Extremob; due to launch in summer 2008 as an MVNO with Vodafone and promises to provide “cool handsets and killer content” plus obviously value for money tariffs. It is however an offer which is more than just about price which puts it apart from many youth offers which have focused on value. Getting all the attention however at the moment has been Blyk which is looking to be one of the first ad supported mobile offers. Much has been made of the tariff side of the project which offers 43 minutes of voice and 217 SMS per month in return for 6 MMS or SMS advertising messages per day. In particular anyone over the age of 32 cannot understand how anyone could stand to receive 6 advertising messages per day.

However another interesting part of the Blyk concept is their brand and communication strategy. In a post on their blog the company explained that they have adopted an open source approach to branding and communication. The idea is explained in more detail on the brand form shift 6 but essentially it means that the brand has certain key characteristics such as the character (^ - called the carat meaning “insert here”) which can then be changed by anyone who wants to contribute. The Blyk logo and style can therefore be any of the following which are taken from short animations created by artists…

One of the Blyk team describes the approach as “it has a loose recognisable aesthetic. You could describe it as optimistic. You don’t get this by holding three-day long marketing team meetings and having a hundred people policing the brand…” Orange who is Blyk’s MVNO partner is doubtless watching with a lot of interest.