Cox Business

Brand Campaign positioning

The Ask

Cox Communications is a telecom provider options that serves much of the southern half of the U.S. Cox Business is their B2B arm, which serves a wide range of enterprise and small- to medium-sized businesses. As part of a project-based relationship with Cox Business, we set out to create a strategic positioning territory that would lay the foundation for a brand campaign.

The Problem

Telecom is an industry that touches everyone’s life in one way or another, but people generally don’t tend to like or trust their telecom provider. The Cox brand is built around the idea that the company fosters human connection, through both the products it provides and its commitment to friendly customer service. The strategic territory needed to ensure Cox Business overcame potential customer’s preconceptions about telecom companies and make them stand out in the category.

The Work

The project kicked off with a series of narrative vignettes written to illustrate different potential approaches to the Cox Business brand. An original list of about 10 was whittled down to three and presented to the client in a workshop where we evaluated the remaining three narratives. The narrative titled “Moments of Truth” rose to the top for both our client and our team as having the best potential for getting more business owners to sign up for Cox.

Once the narrative had been settled on, we set out to build out what exactly these “Moments of Truth” might look like for Cox Business’ main audiences — small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) of less than 100 people, and larger enterprise businesses in the health care, government, education and hospitality sectors.

We built out a matrix of potential proactive and reactive business decisions related to telecom, positive and negative triggers for switching to a new provider, as well as a list of telecom needs for each group accompanied by potential messaging.

You can read the full breakdown below.