How Circles.Life is taking on Singapore’s billion-dollar telco industry

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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve probably seen ads around Singapore that look something like this.

Photo credit: Circles.Life

The campaign is the brainchild of the marketing team at Circles.Life, as part of their ploy to rule the telco space in Singapore. (Just kidding. Or am I?)

With all the hype around Circles.Life and their viral marketing campaigns, I sat down with Delbert Ty, brand and marketing leader, and Megan Yulga, marketing manager at Circles.Life, to find out just how they plan to make that happen.

Circles.Life

Circles.Life is Singapore’s fourth telco and the first digital telco to break into the local telco market in May 2016.

A year on, it claims to be on track to capture four to six percent of Singapore’s mobile postpaid market in the next few years. The current mobile postpaid market in Singapore stands at 5 million subscriptions.

It is on a mission to ‘give power back to the customers’ through its customer-centric approach.

Marketing Circles.Life

The marketing team at Circles.Life. Based in Singapore, the team consists of a marketing and brand lead, marketing manager, 2 UX/UI designers, 2 community managers, a marketing analyst, a digital marketing manager and a designer. Ty is seated third from right, and Yulga is seated third from left. Photo credit: Sim Yanting.

Starting from the business opportunity

“It all goes back to what the customer needs,” said Ty. “That’s our business opportunity. According to our research, it was very clear that in Singapore, people are data deprived. And as former customers of other telcos, we know that this problem is real, and it can be addressed. So how best do we address it?”

“This is where the product comes in, such as our 20GB for S$20 Data Plus option,” he said. “We measure all of our products against how well they address these problems. Once we settle on a solution, we think about how we can get people to be aware of the problem and the solution. That’s where we move from strategy to execution.”

The team then goes through multiple rounds of planned and impromptu brainstorming, after which a campaign idea is locked into their product and marketing calendar. They then brief their agency to develop a creative angle which they will execute together through a hybrid production model of agency and in-house creatives.

Case study: The 20GB for S$20 campaign

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