The three-month campaign, spanning TV, press, radio and online, introduces the strap-line 'Great deals 4 popular people' and plays on people's obsession with popularity.
The campaign, created by Adam & Eve, which replaced WCRS on the account in January, features characters, such as 'the Scout Master', who are labelled with 'Yes' or 'No' stickers indicating whether they are likely to have the numbers of more than 50 friends saved on their mobile phones.
Phones4U hopes to better engage with its 16- to 24-year-old target audience by sending them 'Yes' and 'No' stickers.
An areyoupopular.co.uk microsite will be supported by viral activity.
Despite having significantly fewer stores - 450 compared with Carphone Warehouse's 800 in the UK - Phones4U has been gaining market share since Christmas. Its value message has taken its share of new contracts to about 23% and a third of its target youth audience are customers.
Carphone Warehouse has spent recent years wooing Apple to secure the iPhone sales deal, and has branched out into laptops and accessories, making it more of a destination retailer in the vein of Apple Stores, rather than purely a mobile retailer such as Phones4U.
Russell Braterman, who joined Phones4U as marketing director late last year following the departure of Jim Slater, says 'fierce' competition with Carphone Warehouse has forced it to 'raise its game'.
The company has now taken a calculated chance by ditching a campaign that was billed one of Marketing readers' most irritating ads of 2008, as well as scooping it a Marketing Society Effectiveness Award.
Braterman acknowledges there is a risk that the new campaign will not generate as much attention, but says the old one had 'reached the end of its lifespan and was not saying anything new for the brand'.
He adds that the new campaign retains the 'in your face' element of Phones4U's previous marketing, and takes a swipe at Carphone Warehouse in that it 'doesn't have to worry about upsetting Middle England or being pan-European and generic in our messages'.
The repositioning has involved Phones4U revamping its logo in press ads to give it a more contemporary feel, giving the brand, according to Braterman, 'energy and standout'. He slams the recent price-led press ads from Vodafone, Virgin Mobile and O2 as 'wallpaper'.
Braterman claims that Phones4U's mass-market youth audience can feel 'intimidated' by technologically 'slick brands' such as Apple and Vodafone, and insists that its customers 'may not be taken seriously' by other mobile retailers. 'We pay attention to these people,' he says.
The question now is whether Phones4U's new strategy will be taken seriously by the young target group on which it relies.
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