BECOMING VIRGIN

A podcast from the WBS Forum Series

Mark Heraghty, Warwick MBA graduate and Managing Director of Virgin Media Business, gave a Warwick WBS Forum series presentation on how the telecommunications company NTL: Telewest rebranded to become Virgin Media Business.

Mark Heraghty, Warwick MBA graduate and Managing Director of Virgin Media Business, gave a Warwick WBS Forum series presentation on how the telecommunications company NTL: Telewest rebranded to become Virgin Media Business.

On joining Virgin Media Business in June 2009 as its new Managing Director, Mark Heraghty found himself in a peculiar situation. Whilst the business brand was called NTL: Telewest Business - dating back to the early 1990s, the birth of cable franchises and the subsequent mergers and conglomerations in the industry - following a 2006 merger with Virgin Mobile the consumer division was rebranded Virgin Media.

The reason was clear. Virgin itself wanted to wait a few years before it trusted the business telecommunications division with the Virgin brand. Heraghty found that keeping the NTL: Telewest brand was incompatible with the rest of the Virgin companies and began three months of negotiations with Virgin Entertainment Limited to be given the go-ahead to rebrand. During this period he learned much about the power of the Virgin brand and how it can be used to motivate and drive internal culture change in the business to business environment.

The rebranding involved much more than repainting the marketing material red. Service level agreements and the customer experience became paramount, with the performance of contact centres scrutinised and an emphasis on a better job of recovery when things went wrong. “I was warned during the negotiations that as soon as we called ourselves Virgin more people would complain. That is absolutely what happened” says Heraghty. Customers’ expectations changed to reflect the values they believed the Virgin brand had.

Now with a turnover of four billion pounds a year, a significant amount of that from its business division, Virgin Media is working to overtake Cable & Wireless to be number two in the market, behind leader BT. Leading the way is a change in internal culture amongst the 1,000 people working in the business division, with Virgin brand values embedded in everyday thinking, more engagement between senior management and staff and an emphasis on radical thinking.

During this period he learned much about the power of the Virgin brand...

One such way of doing things differently is the company’s offer to give unconstrained bandwidth to business customers during the day. By in large the network is quiet in the daytime, with peak use coming between 7pm and 10pm. This offer, says Heraghty, went down a storm with customers and also made financial sense for the company, with it costing the business more to restrain use than to offer unrestricted access during the daytime.

For more about the challenges the business faced during its transition from NTL: Telewest Business to Virgin Media Business listen to the full podcast.

Mark Heraghty was appointed as Managing Director for Virgin Media Business in June 2009. He leads the Business Division’s senior management team with direct responsibilities for the leadership of sales, marketing, product management and customer operations in the UK business market with a focus on spearheading growth.

Mark has been involved with the telecommunications industry for the last 17 years, previously as CEO UK and Europe for Cable and Wireless and more recently with Reliance Globalcom, where he was President EMEA, with regional responsibility for the former FLAG Telecom and Vanco businesses that Reliance acquired in 2004 and 2008.

He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Trinity College Dublin (1985) and an MBA awarded by Warwick University Business School (1992).

By Penelope Jenkins