There’s life in the T-Mobile brand yet…but it’s not for sharing
Lara O’Reilly is Marketing Week’s digital and telecoms specialist and here she gives her own view on what companies from Apple to Zynga are up to in the wired world of the web.
The two very different upcoming campaigns for T-Mobile and Orange from Everything Everywhere go some way to clarify the company’s long-standing position that it is still fully supportive of both of its brands – for now at least.
Speculation had been mounting that Everything Everywhere could be looking to drop one or both of the brands involved in its merger, in favour of the parent company brand name – or an entirely new name and proposition altogether (perhaps T’Orange to appeal to the northern contingent, or O ‘n’ T…I can picture the Phones 4 U-esque hand gestures now…and I can see you doing them at your desk).
Indeed, last year’s formation of Everything Everywhere’s 10-strong senior management team did not include a single T-Mobile executive, which fuelled rumours that it might be the brand up for the chop.
But the choice to spend more than £6m on a launch campaign that moves the brand away from its popular flash mob strategy – which could easily have been repeated for endless iterations (Let’s sing on an oil rig! Let’s dance on a traffic island!) seems to be an indicator that the T-Mobile brand has life left in it yet…even if it does involve sharing the spotlight with its big brother Orange.
