Why is this work relevant for Brand Experience & Activation?

It’s not always new products, but it’s sometimes an old and used ones that give people a fresh brand experience. Through the daily customer service, NTT docomo makes people able to revisit their important memories which sleeps inside the old mobile phones. By sharing such emotional experiences, this work has helped the brand to create deeper engagement with customers.

Background

NTT docomo, Japan’s No.1 mobile career company provides service to revitalize the batteries at the docomo Shops. Feature phones have been more popular than smartphones for a long time in Japan. Now that smartphones have spread rapidly in recent years, a large number of feature phones are sleeping at home. In old feature phones, private photos, movies, messages, and animations are remaining but customers cannot see them again because the b atteries are out of work.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

For the senior or family audience, the simple way of communicating brands is still effective, so we choose to create an online movie on the brand web site. By making it a heart-warming story, we aimed to attract the senior or family audience and we tried to share the real value of docomo Shop’s daily service by showing the documentary story.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

In the mobile market of Japan, feature phones have been more popular than smartphones. This tendency is remarkable especially among senior and family users who have been NTT docomo’s users. To them, being connected with family is more crucial than being innovative or smart. So we focused the communication target on them and created a heart-warming documentary movie to keep the engagement with them. Strategically this will help NTT docomo to keep the No.1 brand position in the aging market of Japan.

Describe the execution (30% of vote)

To present the value of this customer service, we made a documentary movie that shares the great moments of people revisiting their memories waiting in your feature phones. To share it with the movie, we asked all the performers to bring their old mobile phones and recover their data inside. The photos, movies, message texts and episodes are real ones from the casts.

List the results (30% of vote)

Sharing the movie on the brand web site, NTT docomo started to extend this service to over 2.300 shops nationwide to achieve emotional engagement with a huge number of customers all over Japan, especially with the people who have been and will be living good lives with mobile phones.