Telstra rolls out new brand identity

By By Wenlei Ma | 19 September 2011
 
Telstra "Today Is Amazing" campaign by DDB Sydney.

Australia's largest telco, Telstra, has unveiled a major rebranding in a bid to connect with customers on a more emotional level.

The rebrand is the biggest change to the telco's identity since its shift from Telecom to Telstra in 1993. All of its communications will now be unified under the new theme.

Telstra's brand will now be represented by six colours, orange, green, turquoise, blue, purple and magenta, to symbolise the diversity of its customers and services. The changes will be applied across the company in the next 18 months, including uniforms, service vehicles and customer communications.

Telstra chief executive David Thodey said the changes are designed to create a stronger and more emotional connection with its customers.

"The time is right for a new look and feel for Telstra. We've been busy changing behind the scenes to better connect with our customers, and our new brand identity reflects this fresh approach," Thodey said.

"Our changes are more than skin deep and come after the introduction of new customer service initiatives such as 24 hour sales and support and on Twitter, weekend appointments with technicians, free calls to Telstra help lines and the launch of simple pricing summaries so customers have the key information they need in plain English.

In addition, Telstra has introduced a customer service facility on Facebook, an online community called CrowdSupport and will roll out improvements to its billing.

Telstra corporate marketing director, Inese Kingsmill, told AdNews: "I think the way Telstra has presented itself externally has been quite schizophrenic, if you think of it from a communications and an advertising point of view. Every time we had a product to launch we'd push the reset button and it would be different to last time. I think when you do that, you let the market determine what your brand is, rather than control it yourself.

"I think the important thing for us is the way Telstra is representing itself has to come from an internal shift. We've always said that we're not going to advertise our way out of brand perceptions that may have been negative in the past. So what we've been doing for the past two years is re-engineering Telstra's mindset, making sure we're really placing the customer at the centre of what we do."

The new brand identity was developed by brand agency Interbrand, part of the DDB Group. DDB Sydney created a campaign to support the new branding, which launched yesterday with television and print executions.

DDB Group chairman and chief executive Marty O'Halloran said: "Telstra is one of Australia's biggest, most recognisable brands. Our challenge was to maintain that familiarity, while also encouraging customers to re-evaluate what Telstra is about.

"Aspects of people's lives are not any one colour, so injecting the existing branding with a full colour wardrobe means than we can take the Telstra brand to customers in a recognising, relevant and engaging way."

Earlier this month, AdNews tipped the rebrand was only weeks away.

DDB Sydney was appointed 10 months ago to handle the rebrand and is now Telstra's lead agency. Since then, BWM and Ogilvy has been cut from the Telstra roster. OMD handles media buying.

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