RCN Home Is Here Campaign

It’s fitting that communications provider, RCN, was the winner of PCMag’s Readers’ Choice Award, because they’re all about choice and customer satisfaction. RCN turns the Internet and cable model on its head by offering customizable bundles served with a side of genuine customer care. (The kind of genuine that makes you feel warm and fuzzy and doesn’t involve wait times that last longer than a Chicago winter.)

So when RCN came to BatesMeron with a new goal to expand their Chicago market and make a bigger impact within their neighboring footprint, all eyes focused in on Skokie, Illinois.

Known for its delicatessens, the Chicago Transit Authority Yellow Line and being a quiet, family-friendly suburb just north of Chicago, Skokie is affectionately referred to as “World’s Largest Village.” RCN already had a solid foundation in the area, servicing a great deal of businesses and village municipalities, including fire and police stations, hospitals and more. However, we wanted to elevate RCN’s presence to see if taking a consumer campaign hyper-local would result in bigger numbers and better brand recognition.

Our goal was to set RCN apart from the rest by playing up their customer dedication and friendliness with fun, familiar depictions of how RCN fits into their customers’ everyday lives– from pajama parties to binge-watching marathons.

To begin our marketing efforts, we created the “Home Is Here” campaign to emphasize the welcome feeling RCN gives customers and the support they feel with them as their service provider. Tied together with a bold purple seal that boasts customization and endless entertainment options, our headlines promoted RCN service as “Sponsor of girls night in,” “Champion of no-fuss channel surfing” and “Remedy to rainy-day blues.” This messaging translated into door hangers, banner ads, billboards at the Yellow Line train stations and full-page ads in the Skokie-focused Pioneer Press, a local news subsidiary of the Chicago Sun-Times.

As a result, our efforts led do a double-digit jump in RCN’s Skokie penetration. The impact of our “Home Is Here” campaign helped create an identity and brand that Skokians could connect with—as well as a unifying voice that proudly stated, “We are Skokie.”