How joined up insights became a key growth driver for Vodafone

Vodafone faced several growth headwinds in 2023, from geopolitical disruption to the softening of demand caused by inflation-linked price rises. To restore momentum, the company tasked its marketing team with making customer-centric growth the number one priority. By improving its ability to understand and deliver on customer expectations, the brand aimed to activate a key growth lever.

Working with agency partner Dentsu, Vodafone sought to tackle a variety of longstanding challenges, including its reliance on patchy and disconnected insights, and its limited ability to translate insights into activation decisions.

The first step was to identify and map audience descriptions across data sources to develop consistent definitions the team could apply to all journey planning. From there, the marketers designed and conducted customer research across all of Vodafone’s markets in Europe and Africa to develop a more holistic view of customer journeys.

The survey data was linked to media planning platforms to create the optimum channel mix for reaching different audiences. All data was built into a cloud-based application for Vodafone – the ‘Pathways Planner’ – which is accessible to every media team across the company’s markets.

The rollout of the Pathways app proved a huge success for Vodafone, as markets have leveraged its insights to make important commercial decisions and inform strategic shifts. For example, richer customer data has helped to determine crucial ‘brand versus performance’ decisions in budgeting.

Pathways has also resulted in more effective campaign and media planning, helping Vodafone win the 2024 Marketing Week Award for Best Use of Market Research, Analytics and Insight.