Telstra

Telecommunications is one of the most exciting, fastest-moving sectors in the world. It’s a sector that helps people and businesses connect, but metrics showed Telstra wasn’t making this connection.

Under the CEO’s leadership, Telstra is now heading into a stronger future, where success means better connecting customers to the people and things that matter most.

Telstra needed a refreshed brand identity to reflect this and communicate its strengths to its 11 million customers. Our research showed that customers don’t understand technology. They find it’s confusing and gets in the way of them getting on with their lives. They find the behaviour of telcos just makes things harder, when what they want most is a company that understands technology on their behalf and makes things as simple and easy as possible.

At the very heart of things, customers want to live easier, better-connected lives.

In exploring this idea, it was important not simply to show connection, but to make a connection with customers. Most expressions of connection are generic or clichéd, they provide little opportunity to express more than the simple fact of connection – people shaking hands, cables linking things, and so on. This is connection on a rational level, whereas people experience a connection emotionally, when something is funny, interesting, surprising or warm.

And so we devised the refreshed brand identity to allow Telstra to connect to the full spectrum of customers with the full spectrum of tones, messages, emotions and colours. The connection is literal, but most importantly, it is felt.

Now more than ever, it was important to create a vehicle to better represent the relationship between Telstra, its customers and the different parts of their lives.

We chose colour to do this, to represent the energy, diversity and emotion that customers experience when their lives are better connected. The different colours allow Telstra to communicate with greater meaning and emotion, with the flexibility to talk to different customers at different times, in a manner that’s relevant and engaging.

In combination with colour, the spectrum device illustrates the connected relationship between customers, Telstra and its products, by putting customers at the centre of everything. It symbolises the central role that our customers have in Telstra’s relationship with them, offering an organising device that presents information clearly, simply.

Telstra has only recently launched the refreshed brand across the complete network of touchpoints – communications, products and services, environments and, most importantly, people.

That said, the early indications are incredibly favourable.

81% of those surveyed responded positively, 58% described it as a “refreshing change”. 65% said it made them “feel that Telstra is changing”.

And Telstra is changing. From the heart, and for the better.