MARKETING PEOPLE

With home-safety installations in over 100,000 homes throughout Ireland, PhoneWatch has been in business since 1991. Now owned by the Scandinavian Alarm Group, it employs over 300 people. Marguerite Cotter, commercial director with responsibility for the group marketing, talks to John

McGee about the PhoneWatch brand.

As a marketer, what are your key marketing challenges?

One of the real assets we have in PhoneWatch is the brand recognition. We’ve been protecting Irish homes for over 25 years and that means when you say our name to someone they instantly understand what we do.

But while the brand recognition is extremely high, we’re keen to grow our brand consideration. Monitored home safety is not something that you automatically think you need. Unfortunately it’s only when something happens to us or our neighbours that we consider it. The challenge from a marketing perspective is to really bottle and communicate that peace of mind feeling you get when you have PhoneWatch. It’s an interesting challenge. How do you sell something that is so intangible?

How do you overcome these challenges?

Over the last two years we have completely revamped our message. The focus moved away from the functional benefits and today we focus entirely on the positive experience and peace of mind that PhoneWatch creates. Everything we do is about reinforcing that message and luckily for us the traditional marketing channels have evolved and channels like digital really lend themselves well to communicating this story.

With the help of some great market research and through working with our agencies we’re getting a lot better at understanding the drivers to purchase and translating them into creative campaigns. This message is starting to cut through.

Fear might seem like an obvious marketing tactic for a home safety company but that is the opposite of what we want our brand to be associated with. So we never use scare tactics.

How competitive is the market and how do you differentiate your service from other security companies?

We are the market leader and for a long time we had the playing field to ourselves but over the past few years there has been much more competition in the market. I believe this is good for us. Its forced us to re-focus and look at what we’re really about and what we stand for in the market place. So, we’re differentiating by providing best in class customer experience. This is something that’s tracked in every department because every one of us plays a part. We’re one of the only providers in Ireland that provides a complete, end-to-end service and specifically monitor all alarms from our alarm receiving centre here in our Dublin offices.

What are the challenges facing the industry?

Innovation is the big one. We need to consistently make sure that our proposition remains relevant to the younger more techsavvy audience. Fortunately for PhoneWatch our parent company is making huge investments in this area. Over the past few years we’ve introduced our smartphone app which will become the main platform for investment over the coming years.