£10m spend for Orange’s Learn project

Mobile phone operator Orange is launching a &£10m advertising campaign to support its Learn initiative.

Learn is Orange’s latest attempt to drive profit in the saturated mobile phone market. The scheme aims to teach the company’s customers to use specific services and functions on their mobile phones.

As part of the new initiative, about 1,800 Orange retail staff have been dubbed “Orange Phone Trainers”. Their job is not only to sell customers mobile phones – and the tariff that goes with them – but also to instruct customers on how to make the best use of their handsets and services. The concept has already been tested in London.

“As an industry, we have not bothered to explain people’s mobile phones to them,” says Orange vice-president of brand marketing Jeremy Dale. “Seventy per cent of our customers use text messaging, but 80 per cent of our customers only use ten per cent of their phone’s capabilities.”

As part of the initiative, Orange will be offering its customers free trials of its data services for three months. After that, they will be included as a package for &£4 a month.

The advertising campaign, created by Mother, launches today. It is set on the campus of a fictional “Orange Training Academy”, where Orange staff are trained by a 13-year-old boy called Dylan.