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| Everything you ever wanted to know about Ericsson CORPORATE BROCHURES, PRESS RELATIONS AND ERICSSON’S FIRST EVER WEB SITE As deregulation and liberalization transformed its markets, Ericsson stepped up its corporate communications activities. We helped create brochures, press material, advertising, and speeches – not to mention Ericsson’s first ever web site – to support a higher level of communication.
Global coverage, local commitment: Ericsson’s core advantage With a tiny home market, exports have always been vital for Ericsson. It was a global company long before globalization was invented. Long-standing commitments to local markets – including R&D, manufacturing and technology transfer – gave Ericsson a significant advantage. The purchasing decisions of state-owned telecoms operators were highly politicized: a company that could show that it ploughed revenues back into the local economy was likely to be favoured.
In 1988–9 Ericsson’s Corporate Relations office commissioned a series of brochures detailing the company’s commitments and activities, country by country, across four regions: Europe, Asia, Latin America and North America. Simon Fraser, the founder of Fraser & Bilder Communications, helped research and write three of them. A fifth brochure, entitled Systems and Products and also written by Fraser, gave an overview of everything Ericsson made, including such gems as the latest Hotline Pocket phone, which “weighs just 630 grams, and fits easily into a briefcase for maximum convenience”. “In these days before email, research methods were primitive,” recalls Fraser. “The only way was to phone the top Ericsson people in each country, and ask them what they were doing: then listen to the faint, crackly reply across an intercontinental connection, and scribble down notes as fast as possible. “The information I acquired contained quite a few surprises, even for the people at LME.” The brochures were subtly tailored to focus on Ericsson’s opportunities and strengths in each region. For instance the brochure on Latin America, where state-owned network operators were planning huge expansions at the time, highlighted Ericsson’s 9,000 employees across the region, with eleven factories in five countries. The brochure reminded readers that early in the twentieth century, Ericsson had actually built and run the public telephone networks in four Latin American countries.
In Europe, the main priority for the brochure was to position Ericsson as a credible supplier within the Common Market. Although its headquarters were outside the EEC (Sweden did not join until 1995), Ericsson employed almost as many people in EEC countries as it did in Sweden. It was arguably more “European” than France’s Alcatel and Germany’s Siemens, both of which relied very heavily on their home markets. A changing global market At this time, Ericsson, like its competitors, was starting to adapt to a market situation that was changing profoundly. Throughout its history, Ericsson had usually dealt with just one customer per country – the government-owned PTT monopoly. Now deregulation and liberalization were starting, and competitors were appearing in each national market, in part spurred by the development of mobile communications. This had two important consequences. First, Ericsson would have to do business with a new generation of commercially minded customers, at first in Europe and North America, but ultimately all over the world. Second, it would have to be able to support these customers as they expanded beyond their national boundaries to become regional and global players. The cosy relationships with monopolistic customers were drawing to a close. Things were starting to move much faster, and that impacted strongly on Ericsson’s branding and marketing. Ramping up corporate communications
In response to these changes, Ericsson was ramping up its global corporate communications activities. It began to spend more money on making a splash at the major international trade shows (Telecom Geneva, CeBIT, CommunicAsia etc.). It also increased communication with its expanding shareholder community – it was around this time that Ericsson’s shares began to be traded on the London and New York stock exchanges, and a significant proportion of Ericsson’s shares came to be owned and traded by investors outside Sweden. Simon Fraser contributed widely to Ericsson’s corporate communications activities during this time. He wrote speeches for senior executives to deliver at the major telecommunications exhibitions, and also compiled the press kits and other marketing materials Ericsson used at these events. He also worked with Ericsson’s London advertising agency, CHJS, to create quarterly double-page advertorials that coincided with the announcement of Ericsson’s financial results. These news-heavy advertisements appeared in the major business magazines, such as The Economist, Business Week and Newsweek, and were invaluable in publicizing Ericsson’s commercial successes around the world, particularly in the exciting new field of mobile communications.
Ericsson’s first web site In 1993–4 Ericsson’s three main business areas produced complete press information binders, gathering together all the facts and figures about their products, services, technologies, and markets. Each binder contained 80–120 pages of information: the definitive source of reference about Ericsson. Simon Fraser helped compile the first, for Ericsson Telecom, and then wrote the complete binders for Ericsson Business Networks and Ericsson Radio Systems. When Ericsson launched its very first web site, this information was copied directly into it.
Drinking songs from around the world Ericsson increasingly saw the need to coordinate activities, and raise the quality of its communications in local markets. In the 1990s it organized a series of International Marketing Communications Conferences, or IMCCs, where a hundred or more marketing specialists from Ericsson’s operating companies around the world would meet over three days, to share experiences, ideas – and, on the final night, traditional national drinking songs. Nils-Ingvar (“Ludde”) Lundin, Vice President for corporate communications at LME and the official host of the IMCCs, invited Simon Fraser to attend the IMCCs, and take the official minutes for later distribution. “Ludde was a heavyweight PR operator of the old school,” Fraser recalls. “He would hang out with the top Swedish business journalists at Operabaren [the Opera Bar in Stockholm] and other smoke-filled haunts. It was said that his value to the company was as much in what he kept out of the papers, as for what he got into them. “He was also famously contemptuous of consultants, and absolutely prohibited them from communicating with the media on Ericsson’s behalf. So I was especially privileged to be invited to the IMCCs. I was, Ludde said, ‘the only consultant I will allow here’.” |
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