Environment / Challenge The B2B telecom manager is a no nonsense, risk averse decision-maker. He/she, unless persuaded differently, tends to view the big incumbent provider as the safe behemoth: bureaucratic, unresponsive but not a telecom choice that gets anyone accused of recklessness. By contrast, PECOAdelphia is based on an innovative customer-centric business model. Accordingly, the client wanted a branding and sales campaign that was “edgy” and “breaking the mold.” This certainly appealed to our fertile imagination and latent iconoclasm and the client loved the comps we presented. We could have basked forever in the creative glory of that campaign. Strategy Which would probably have flopped as a credible brand launch or sales driver. Our creative head (who is also our strategic planning head) voiced those doubts and recommended focus group research. Although the message was right, we reasoned that the brand image was not based on the sensibilities of the target decision-makers. Our subsequent research tested the edgy concept versus one leveraging the brand equity of PECO, the parent company. We believed that the only way to get share of mind with this particular target audience was to use the halo of the respected Fortune 500 utility (that’s PECO, now part of Exelon) to achieve perceptual parity with it’s much larger competitor. And then to reenergize the brand perception with the responsiveness message of the more entrepreneurial side of the new company’s culture. Results The awareness and sales results were staggering. In a seven week campaign, awareness leaped from 12% to 42% among all B2B telecom decision-makers. The agency tracked click-thrus to the PECOAdelphia website, which jumped from 20 a month to over 800 a month. And the most fascinating change was registered in the perceptual mapping research. Awareness not only shot up but also was accompanied by a specific perception of PECOAdelphia as the only brand to occupy a perceptual space at the intersection of value and reliability. The campaign was such a huge driver of sales that the company had to stop taking new orders for a month to catch up on the new installation activity…a problem we would wish on all of our clients.