Orange client story

We’ve been working with Orange since the early days of Engine and have completed over a dozen projects with UK and Global Brand teams. The Orange brand teams have been the people who have driven the development of services and service experiences from the dual perspectives of the service user and the qualities that make what a brand offers unique.

One early and formative project for Engine was a commission by Orange to come up with a way to evaluate the application of the little Orange square on their phones. The brief to Engine was a response to a commercial argument that it would be cheaper to supply the phones to customers direct from the manufacture. We developed the counter argument from the perspective of the user experience and the value attributed to the phone by the brand. Needless to say the square wasn’t removed at that time.

Some of the most interesting service design work with Orange has included the development of a methodology to enable Brand teams to design the voices used in voice based services. We encoded information about the way the human voice is perceived into a workshop method and other tools - working with actors, voice artists and voice experts to bring the design of voices to life.

Audioscape

Work on voices lead us to the development of a Audioscape - a visual and audio representation of what Orange sounds like.  We collected and recorded the sound of Orange - from the beeps and silences, to the sonic icons and above-the-line music and voices. We brought the lot together into an interactive map. For the first time, Brand teams had a tool to design a coherent sonic brand across touch points - many of which of course are heard and not seen. Having completed this for the UK we then extended our audio cartography to Oranges operating companies across the globe looking to identify a core audio-DNA across Orange services.

We helped Orange in the UK to form their point of view in anticipation of phones that would allow people to access ‘adult content’. Such a future presented a challenge of brand ethics. Through service scenarios we helped them to explore how they could ensure that access to such services could be controlled, for example, by parents and to ensure that Orange could clearly demark the line between the experience of Orange brand and that of the service and content.

We’ve also taken on an editorial role for Orange as producers of an internal publication.

IQ internal publication

On their behalf, we digested various sources of consumer and trends research and produced a bi-monthly broadsheet publication that was distributed to brand and product managers. The brief was inspired by the realisation that as a company they spend a lot of money on research that is too cumbersome to use.

Service innovation with Orange has included rapid projects using stimulus drawn from a range of sectors to generate new ideas for phone tariffs and an exploration of future phone bills.

In 2006 we completed a large piece of service design work helping to shape service delivery in stores and in call centers as part of OrangeҒs re-branding of the Spanish operator, Amena. The subsequent training programme that we designed became the global standard having been translated back for the UK, Moldova and beyond.

Engine supported the Orange Global Brand team in the development of a European-wide retail experience strategy. We worked with an international retail design consultancy, to help Orange realise the strategy.

We also developed and ran a programme with Orange Netherlands to develop new strategic initiatives across their business towards an even greater focus on the customer.