What would give Telecom back the 'X' factor?

XT IMAGE: Top Gear host Richard Hammond was the face of the XT advertising campaign.

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Late last year, Telecom spent a bomb on a new logo, new colours, and a new brand ad campaign fronted by Top Gear star Richard Hammond to plug its XT mobile phone network. Just months later, that brand was on life-support, with the mere acronym "XT" synonymous with failure, as repeated problems with the network hit Telecom's 220,000 cellphone customers south of Taupo.

Last week, Telecom had reportedly asked its advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, to pull together a plan for overhauling the brand once more.

Telecom spokesman Mark Watts would not comment on "industry speculation". He said Telecom's primary focus was on getting the service up and running the way it should for customers. He said work had been done up and down the country in the past couple of weeks, and in particular on the radio network controllers at the heart of the failures.

So the Sunday Star-Times asked brand and PR specialists what the beleaguered company needs to do to save face.

The verdict? Telecom doesn't need to blow millions on advertising or a sexy new logo – it just needs to show a human face, work hard and eat humble pie.

What the experts said...Roel Wijland, academic and branding expert

Wijland, a branding and marketing communications lecturer at Otago University, said the very term XT had become synonymous with failure.

"It becomes ingrained in colloquial language – almost that if companies do an `XT' it is the New Zealand version of having a technical failure ... "

But superficial changes to the brand wouldn't help, as consumers were too savvy.

"Consumers can see the irony of it all; if they rebrand, everyone in New Zealand will know that it is the same animal and the same engine under the hood, just with a different name on it.

"Changing the name or changing the colour, or changing the brand from a star to a sun, that's all advertising of the 1990s. New Zealand's mobile and landline consumers can see through this, and just want an honest effort by a human side of Telecom. It's a long way down from such a glamorous campaign [for XT] and I think the real question is whether they can eat humble pie in a convincing manner."

Deborah Pead, publicist

Pead, founder of Auckland firm Pead PR, said traditionally big telcos would throw piles of money around to salvage a brand but what Telecom needed to do was fix its service before looking at rebranding.

"You can't put lipstick on a pig. You've actually got to make sure you've got some fine pork first."

But it's not all bad news for Telecom: "It's a huge brand, and these brands are hugely durable over time." She believed Telecom had made a good first step by offering generous compensation packages.

Jill Brinsdon, brand strategist

Brinsdon, director of brand consultancy Radiation, said the "penny that has to drop" with many big organisations, including Telecom, was that a brand was not a piece of design or a logo, but an experience.

"The key message that is coming to the consumer is the voice at the end of the phone when they ring to complain. That's the voice of the brand.

"What we want from our brands is to be able to trust them and to believe that it's an authentic thing – not a glossy ad.

"We want to know that Telecom are real people, trying their best to get it right for us. Not that they have just spent another $2.5 million on a campaign to try and convince us otherwise."

Going to an ad agency was "probably the last thing that needs to be dealt with".

- © Fairfax NZ News