Vodafone NBN — Brand Awareness & Customer Acquisition Strategy
A bit of context
This was my capstone thesis project during my Master's in Marketing at UTS Sydney. We were assigned Vodafone NBN as our subject, and honestly — I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. Once I started digging into the data and talking to real users, it became genuinely interesting.
The problem — in plain English
Vodafone has a brand problem in Australia. Everyone knows the name, but when it comes to NBN, most people default to Telstra or Optus. After doing my own research, the reason came down to three things: prices felt too high, coverage wasn't reliable enough, and most people didn't even know Vodafone had NBN plans in the first place.
What I did
I surveyed 30 NBN users across Australia and combined that with competitor research, customer reviews, and market data. I wanted to understand not just what people thought, but why they weren't choosing Vodafone.
What came back was pretty clear — 80% of respondents had never even seen a Vodafone NBN ad. And 64% said pricing made them question whether it was worth it. That's not a product problem, that's a marketing and positioning problem.
What I found surprising
When I looked at who was actually open to switching to Vodafone, it wasn't the people you'd expect. Business professionals, remote workers, sports fans, and tech enthusiasts were the most receptive segments — people who actually valued reliability and speed over just getting the cheapest deal. Vodafone was spending energy trying to compete on price against Telstra when they had a completely different audience available to them.
What I recommended
Two ideas came out of this:
Bundle campaign
Combining NBN with mobile, streaming (Netflix, Spotify), and Smart TV into one package. Instead of competing on price, make the value so obvious that price becomes secondary. Promote it through targeted ads and in-store AR experiences.
Community play
Sponsoring the Santos Tour Down Under cycling event in Adelaide. Give attendees free NBN access during the 11-day event. Let people actually experience the product rather than just see an ad for it. Word of mouth and lived experience were the top two ways people discovered NBN plans anyway — so meet them there.
What I took away from this
This project taught me that most brand problems aren't really brand problems — they're positioning problems. Vodafone wasn't losing because their product was worse. They were losing because the right people didn't know about them, and the wrong message was reaching the wrong audience.
That gap between what a product actually offers and how it's perceived by users — that's what I want to spend my career closing.