Responsible marketing means making sure our communications are always legal, decent, fair, honest, truthful and sensitive to the views of different groups in society.
Responsible Marketing Guidelines
Our Responsible Marketing Guidelines – updated in 2008 – set out standards for all Vodafone marketing and joint marketing with other brands. They cover advertising, direct marketing, point-of-sale material and also third-party mobile advertising on the Vodafone network.
All our operating companies must comply with the guidelines, in addition to relevant national regulations and codes.
To ensure our marketing is consistently responsible across the Group, we must ensure that marketing teams are aware of the Guidelines and understand potential local concerns in individual markets. We have developed a responsible marketing checklist to help our marketing teams and creative agencies identify any potential issues when developing advertising campaigns.
The main areas covered by the guidelines include:
- Ensuring Vodafone marketing material complies with local law, marketing and advertising codes and self regulatory bodies
- Digital marketing – we apply the same standards to digital media marketing as to traditional media
- Portraying our products and services accurately and substantiating any comparative claims.
Our operating companies assess their communications and advertising material periodically to confirm that it complies with the Responsible Marketing Guidelines. The assessments are signed off by the chief marketing officer of each operating company.
Complaints are sometimes made about our advertising. We monitor these complaints as a measure of our performance.
Cutting out the small print
Insufficiently clear pricing and extensive small print can affect the level of trust our customers place in Vodafone and the service packages we offer. Our global strategy is to progressively reduce the amount of small print in our advertising.
Vodafone Romania put this into practice with a fun 'no asterisk' advertising campaign in 2006/07. Promotion details were laid out clearly, simply and prominently in all advertising material, eliminating the need for small print. In the Czech Republic, a 'no small print' campaign was launched entitled "No flea text. No hidden hooks". In Germany, we reduced the amount of small print by around 40% in 2006/07.
