Some of them will arrive by yearend as part of the group’s strategy to substantially change its offer after the shift to the German brand, Hans-Christian Schwingen, chief brand officer with Deutsche Telekom told ZF in an interview.
“You will see a number of things happening in terms of rebranding in the next two months, there are hundreds of projects in progress and I expect some of them to be completed by yearend,” Schwingen said.
One of the main challenges of the 2,000-strong team that worked on the biggest rebranding process on the local telecommunications market with a EUR15 million budget, the shift of Cosmote and Romtelecom to the `T’ brand of Deutsche Telekom, was to make the people believe the operation was more than just a color change. (The change from the former two’s green and blue to the latter’s magenta i.e.)
The rebranding in Romania was discussed as an intent before the process was even approved, but it only started after making certain the shareholders approved it, Schwingen said. Cosmote and Romtelecom’s majority owner is Greece’s OTE, while the Romanian government owns 46% in Romtelecom and less than 20% in Cosmote via the Ministry for the Information Society.
OTE’s majority shareholder is Deutsche Telekom. The rebranding was approved by a board meeting of Romtelecom in March. The budget allocated to it was EUR15 million and 2,000 people from Romania and other DT countries participated to it.
Coordinating the process was a challenge in itself, so a steering committee was created and included Nikolai Beckers (the Cosmote and Romtelecom CEO), people from Claudia Nemat’s (the DT board member in charge of Europe region) department and Schwingen himself and then the project teams were created who reported directly to this committee, Schwingen said.
To keep track of the preparations for rebranding, each project was assigned a color – green, yellow or red, depending on its progress towards completion. The company also organized seminars and training courses to prepare for the shift from Cosmote and Romtelecom to T. By September 13, more than 40 stores of the two companies had been remodeled to T standards, the two separate websites replaced with a single website and the two separate services officers turned into an integrated service package offer.
One of the major concerns of the team that supervised the rebranding process was that once completed, people should see changes befitting the expectations from the T brand of Deutsche Telekom, Schwingen said. One such example was the investment in a new IPTV platform, introduced at the time of the rebranding, which allows for delivery of video content on the mobile devices. Cosmote and Romtelecom had been lagging behind Orange in Romania in this department, which already had made significant investment in developing its own video platform.
Another goal of the team supervising Romania’s shift to the T brand is to avoid creating the wrong expectations from the German brand.
The first assessment of the rebranding will come in six months, when the group will conduct surveys of the market to see whether the people found out about Telekom Romania brand, Schwingen said.
(English version by Loredana Fratila-Cristescu)