After more than a decade working with Telus, Lisa Mack has found that driving affinity in a competitive market through evolving the brand is the “all-encompassing, burning priority” that drives the company.
As the company’s vice president of brand, Mack helms Telus’ brand and sponsorships, leading its masterbrand strategy and marketing. Her work involves infusing key corporate narratives and Telus’ social purpose legacy across all brand, sponsorship and product marketing. She also leads all key partnerships and agency relationships.
Mack has worked in a variety of roles for Telus since 2014, and previously worked as a group account director for Publicis Modem.
Amid a challenging market and difficult economy in Canada, Mack says the company’s ultimate goal is to make it “unmissable” to do business with them, while effectively communicating who the brand is, and the meaningful impact it has.
“We know that building brand affinity is mission critical. We really can’t do a whole lot for our business if we don’t actually start with that warm and welcoming open door,” Mack tells strategy. “But really it’s more than building awareness. We need to work so much harder in these market conditions to be able to capture attention, and nurture and really build emotional connections.”
The internet category seems to focus a lot on speed and reliability. How have you and your agency partners managed to create a more emotional connection to evolve your outreach so that it stands out?
My answer will apply to all our core service portfolios. If you think about Critters, [it’s been] a hallmark of our brand iconography for more than 20 years. Our Critters have really evolved with us, and they help us effectively communicate our story, whether it’s about world-leading network speed, realized reliability or even the positive environmental impacts we are having. We have the brand vernacular that allows us to use Critters as a metaphor for conveying human experience. This has been a truth for all of these years. Our Critters allow us to tell the story to a consumer in a way that is sometimes humorous, sometimes emotive, but drives that connection. It brings things like network speed and reliability in a practical way to connect with audiences.
I really think an evolution took place in 2021, when we evolved our brand promise. Our brand promise was “The future is friendly,” but we made a pivotal shift to “let’s make the future friendly.” That might seem like a small change, but it’s pretty significant when you think about that [it’s] an opportunity to remind customers about our mission to make the world a better place. We make sure all of our campaigns align with that brand promise.
Given the ubiquity of the Bell Let’s Talk campaign, how do you hope to forge your own path of corporate social responsibility for Telus?
Kudos to Bell for what they have done over many years and its consistent support [of that program]. It’s an admirable cause, and it’s one our category needs to support. But at Telus, we fundamentally believe there needs to be a really strong connection between good business and doing good in our community, which are not mutually exclusive and go hand in hand.
For us rather than focusing on a single campaign, our customers [and] shareholders, want to work with companies that share their values. This gives us a significant advantage as we have been leading with purpose for over 20 years.
It’s embedded in all our business decisions, where we invest our capital and who we partner with. All of that is built into our brand and marketing strategy.
The results are undeniable. Our strategy of truly and authentically being guided by our purpose [has worked]. Over the last two decades, our brand value has grown from less than a billion to $11.7 billion today. We don’t need a singular campaign to meaningfully leverage our purpose as a differentiator. We don’t just talk the talk, our brand really is an authentic representation of our lived values. We really work hard to embed these efforts into all of our marketing.
Much like the Big 5 banks, there is a strong undercurrent of animosity toward the big telco providers. How do you deal with that?
I would classify Telus as a customer-first organization and maybe even a customer-obsessed organization. And so consumer feedback is incredibly important to understand how to shape the decisions that we are making and how we need to communicate our differentiators. So, does our purpose lend us a helping hand? Absolutely. Companies with a strong social purpose have increased customer loyalty. Those customers who understand our purpose, are more likely to recommend us to friends or family.
We lean on these pillars of purpose and our social innovations to be able to combat industry negatives. There is obviously industry negativity out there, and so our job is to reinforce all the good we do in the community, whether that’s around connectivity in remote areas to bridge the digital divide, or enabling remote work and education solutions or healthcare. We do operate in an industry plagued with criticism, and frankly one where also the customer demands and needs are always changing.
Consumers continue to look for brands they trust, and do business with brands which share their values for environmental and social wellbeing, and who truly demonstrate those values and actions. That’s where Telus excels.
