I sat down recently with Tom Rainsford, one of the people who helped build giffgaff from the inside. Not as a consultant who parachuted in with a deck, but as someone who was there from the beginning, shaping the brand, living inside the mess, and working out what actually mattered.
What came out of that conversation was less a neat brand case study and more a set of principles that most companies never figure out. giffgaff is over 15 years old now. It’s owned by Virgin. The market has moved. But the thinking behind it is, if anything, more relevant today than it was in 2009.
Here are six things Tom said that I can’t stop thinking about.
1. Three words. That's it.
In 2008, Gav Thompson came back from a conference in San Francisco, opened his notebook, and wrote three words. Mutual. Fair. Simple.
That was it. No 40-page strategy document. No brand architecture pyramid. No “purpose ecosystem.” Just three words that described a different way of doing mobile that didn’t yet exist.
Tom described it like this:
“He thought there must be a way to do a mobile network that is mutual, fair and simple. And that was the sort of first light bulb moment of what then became giffgaff.”
Most brands never get to three words. They get to three pages, which are then compressed into a tagline that nobody inside the company believes and nobody outside the company understands. giffgaff started with a principle, not a proposition. The clarity came first, and everything else was built around it.
There’s a lesson in that. Not “write a shorter brief” but something harder: do you actually know what you stand for at the level of a sentence? Not what you say you stand for. What every product decision, pricing decision, and marketing decision actually demonstrates you stand for. giffgaff’s three words were load-bearing. Everything else rested on them.
(A photocopy of the orginal three words on paper!)
2. Pick an enemy, not a fight
giffgaff launched into a market where every major mobile network had terrible net promoter scores. People hated their phone contracts. They hated the asterisks. They hated being trapped in expensive deals with brands that felt like they were taking your money and offering as little as possible in return.
So giffGaff had an enemy. A clear one. The fat cats of mobile.
Their first instinct was to call it out directly. A campaign called “The Man,” all about fat cats and sticking it to them. It didn’t work.
Someone in a research group put it plainly, and Tom has clearly never forgotten it:
“If a brand or a business is going to take a minute of my time, I want to know what you do and what you do well, not what you don’t like or what you think someone else doesn’t do well.”
So they changed. The ethos shifted from disruptive to positively disruptive. Tom described the difference using an analogy:
“You can be disruptive and show your hatred for fat cats and all the rest of it by kicking in the windows of HSBC. But it’s just disruptive. There’s no positivity that comes out of it.”
This is one of the most underrated ideas in brand strategy. You do not need to name your enemy to beat them. You just need to build something so obviously better that the implication is clear. giffgaff never needed to say “Big teleco is ripping you off.” They just needed to be cheaper, simpler, and fairer, and let the contrast do the work.
3. Community as infrastructure, not hype
Right now, every brand deck I read has the word “community” in it. Community-led growth. Building community. Owned community. It gets said so often it has stopped meaning anything.
giffgaff made community the actual operating model of the business.
From day one, there were no call centres. No retail footprint. Members served each other, answered each other’s questions, solved each other’s problems. Tom described the scale of it: “On average, six responses in something like 90 seconds with like a 97% accuracy rate, 24/7, 365, of anything.”
That is not a community strategy. That is a business model. And the difference matters enormously, because it means the community wasn’t decorative. It was functional. It had a job to do that actually needed doing, and it did that job better than a conventional call centre ever could.
Most brands that talk about community mean: we want our customers to feel part of something, and we’d like them to create content for us. giffgaff meant: our customers are the infrastructure. Their participation is what makes the economics work.
The result was a brand behaviour, not a marketing campaign. You cannot fake that. You can write “community-led” in a strategy document but if the community is not actually doing anything structural, if they’re not baked into the product, the pricing, the operations, it’s just a word.
Come see me live!
Building a brand has never been tougher. Change isn’t gradual anymore. It’s exponential. More has shifted in the last decade than the previous century.
At the same time… 67% of ads are skipped. & attention is harder to earn than ever.
That’s why every brand now has to think and act like a challenger.
Not because it’s trendy. Because it’s survival.
I’m running a workshop on this at Brands&Culture in London
📍 May 7th, 2PM
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4. Mean it, don’t say it
Here’s where it gets interesting. giffgaff had community as infrastructure. But they also made it the face of the brand.
Tom described going to people’s houses in Cardiff to film them in their bedrooms, then putting that footage on the outdoor boards on their road. Members were in the TV ads. Their tweets ran live inside E4 sponsorship idents, pulled in real time from conversations about the shows giffgaff was sponsoring.
“We went to such huge lengths to make sure that even if it wasn’t seen or explicitly said, the truth continued to still be there. Because it felt like the minute we start to corrode that truth, you’re just like every other network.”
This is what I mean when I say community as brand behaviour. GiffGaff didn’t just use community in their marketing. They made the community the proof of the proposition. Mutual. Fair. Simple. You want evidence? Here are the actual people. Here are their actual faces, on their actual street.
It’s hard to fake that level of commitment to a positioning. Which is exactly why it worked.
5. Create flywheels, not campaigns
Once you see the logic, it’s almost elegantly simple. But it took genuine conviction to build, because every element of it depends on every other element.
Community handles customer service. No call centres, no retail footprint. That keeps costs down. Lower costs mean the pricing stays fair. Fair pricing attracts members who believe in what you’re doing. Members who believe in it tell other people. Member get member drove 50% of acquisition at giffgaff’s peak.
Tom put it well: “The idea was to create an ecosystem.” A dartboard, as he described it, where the most committed members at the bullseye generated so much heat and energy that it radiated outwards, pulling more people in, feeding the whole machine.
Each revolution made the next one stronger. More members meant more community capacity for service. Better service meant lower churn. Lower churn meant better economics. Better economics meant better pricing. Better pricing meant more members.
This is what challenger brands rarely manage to build. They get the contrarian positioning right, they find the enemy, they launch with some noise. But the flywheel requires structural thinking, not just creative thinking. giffgaff worked because the brand, the business model, and the community were not three separate things. They were the same thing, expressed in different ways.
6. Culture is everything
Tom left this for near the end of our conversation, almost as an afterthought. But I think it might be the most important part.
giffgaff operated out of a separate office from O2. It had its own induction, its own internal “ministries” (ministry of good times, ministry of wellbeing, ministry of learning), its own ways of working. And crucially, O2 understood this. They gave GiffGaff the room to be different.
“You had the oxygen to let it work,” Tom said.
Most challenger brands, when they succeed, become interesting to large companies. And large companies, when they buy interesting things, immediately try to make them less interesting. It’s not malicious. It’s just the gravitational pull of the way they operate.
giffgaff worked because the 160th person to join got the same brand induction as the 20th. Because the internal values were as load-bearing as the external ones. Because the people who ran it, Mike Fairman and Ash Schofield among them, protected the culture as fiercely as they protected the P&L.
You can have a great proposition, a clever flywheel, and a sharp enemy. But if the organisation doesn’t live the values internally, the whole thing eventually curdles. People can tell. They always can.
Conclusion
GiffGaff didn’t grow because of a single campaign or clever positioning. It grew because everything worked together.
It started with radical clarity, three words that actually guided decisions. It found an enemy, but won by building something better rather than picking a fight. It turned community into infrastructure, not a marketing idea, making customers part of the business model itself. It then proved the brand through behaviour, not claims, using real members as living evidence. From there, it built a self-reinforcing flywheel, where product, pricing, and advocacy fed each other. And underpinning it all was a culture strong enough to protect the model, even inside a larger organisation.