International branding consultancy, Turquoise, has appointed Zoe Carnell as Group Account Director.

Zoe joins the Dubai office as a senior member of the team. She will head up the communications and media division and ahs 12 years experience on the client side, managing re-branding projects and launching campaigns for some of the biggest names in the market, both in the UK and United Arab Emirates (UAE). Carnell was formerly senior retail at Orange UK and moved to the UAE two years ago to work on du, an integrated telecommunications service provider.

22 November 2008 : Read more...

Content is king and viewers can now take it for themselves wheneve they want. So why do we need channels anymore? Jon Creamer finds out why channel branding has become more important than ever before.

Ten years ago, the death of the traditional channel was widely predicted. In the on-demand age, content would truly be king. Consumers would simply grab the content they wanted, wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Why would anyone need the shop keeper to dish out the sweeties when we all had our own key to the shop?

But although content is certainly king, there’s increasing recognition that the major channel brands will become more, not less, important as time goes on. With so much content to choose from, weary consumers need a little help in choosing what to watch – whether they watch that content on the TV, online, or on their mobile. But channels have to fight through a lot more clutter to be heard now and their branding has to work much harder as a consequence.

The rebirth of the channel
When viewers can go and get content from the internet or on DVD, why do they need a channel to give it to them? Most commentators now reckon that many of the smaller, niche channels that grew up over the past decade will start to disappear in an on-demand world. As on-demand services become more prevalent “the number of channels will shrink because channels are expensive to set up and run and online is a far cheaper delivery mechanism,” says Gareth Mapp, creative director at Turquoise. If it’s a particular niche of content you’re after, it’s much easier to go to an on-demand service and take it yourself. Why wait for a channel to dish it out?

28 July 2008 : Read more...

Turquoise climbs Marketing's Top Design Agencies league...

Turquoise has been awarded 29th place in Marketing's prestigious Top Design Agencies league table, moving up nine ranks from last year.

10 July 2008 : Read more...

The UK Design Skills Alliance has appointed Turquoise to develop its brand in a bid to attract much-needed funding.

The Design Skills Alliance is a body formed as a collaboration between the Design Council and Creative & Cultural Skills. Over three years it is seeking £5m to secure the delivery of initiatives set out in its Design Blueprint, published in March (www.designweek.co.uk 26 March). This aims to help designers gain new skills and raise teaching standards in schools and colleges.

'Appointing Turquoise to articulate an identity for the Design Skills Alliance is an important step forward for design skills, education and professional development in the UK. This work will form the foundations on which the delivery of the Design Blueprint will depend,' says Lesley Morris, head of the Design Skills Alliance.

26 June 2008 : Read more...

At Turquoise, we’re always on the look-out for fresh new talent, which means we get to chat to quite a few graduates. So I found the News Analysis piece ‘Suffering for their craft’ (DW 24 April) very interesting.

Work experience should be an integral part of the development of any designer. For students and new graduates, it is a great opportunity to get experience of different areas of design and provides a better understanding of the processes and idiosyncrasies of the industry.

This makes them better prepared to survive and flourish as designers in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Ultimately, it makes them more employable – and they’ll have contacts to call upon.

For the employer, it’s a great chance to establish relationships with potential employees. It can be hard work and time-consuming, but we have an almost moral duty to help our graduates and ensure that the quality of young blood coming into the industry continues to improve.

Juan Pedraza, Creative Director, Turquoise, London WC1

22 May 2008 : Read more...

This week we catch up with Juan Pedraza, creative director at branding consultancy Turquoise and ask what he likes to do at the weekend…

It's the weekend, how do you feel?
Weekend!!!!! I thought it was Wednesday! The week has come and gone so fast again that I didn’t have nearly enough time to do all the things I set myself to do. Time flies when you are having fun…

But this weekend I am definitely going to that exhibition I have been postponing for too long, will catch the latest Coen Brothers’ offering, meet that friend with the new baby for a coffee and…oh it’s Monday again.

What’s your favourite Friday night drink?
Orange Lucozade (the still, not the sparkling stuff) down at the Sobell Leisure Centre, where I join a bunch of party animals for another three hour session of badminton. Great at getting rid of excess levels of adrenaline…

Do you ever have to work at the weekend?
Not if I can avoid it. I prefer working late during the week to finish things off, rather than breaking into precious weekend-time. Having said that, I have never managed the art of switching off from work, so I always have projects I’m working on in the back of my mind pestering me for attention.

If yes, how do you feel about it?
Sometimes, because of our internationally wide-spread client base, we have to travel at the weekend. However, I don’t particularly mind this – it comes with the territory.

What’s your favourite weekend activity?
I think my favourite weekend activity is relaxing, reading one of the three books I have started (and not yet finished) in the sunshine, but I am not sure since I can’t remember what it feels like. Weekends just seem to go so fast, and seem to be getting faster!

If you could spend the weekend with anyone in the world (friends and family aside) who would it be and why?
It would be Jeremy Paxman, David Attenborough and Jonathan Ross. I am sure they would be an interesting, if ever so eclectic, bunch to spend some time with. They would all have fascinating (and funny) tales to tell – from M&S men’s pants to elephant mating habits and the latest film releases, I’m sure there would never be a dull moment.

Where would you go?
Down their local pub for a pint or two. Mind you, I wonder if I would be able to get a word in edgeways!

25 April 2008 : Read more...

Go's CEO describes their award-winning rebrand.

Newly privatised Maltacom decided to adopt a unified brand to show customers and employees that four separate divisions had become one. Alan Burkitt-Gray interviews CEO David Kay.

Go away from the state monopoly

Take a government-run phone company, privatise it, and then let it compete in the market against a bunch of dynamic newcomers. How does it survive?

That was the challenge faced by David Kay when he became CEO of Maltacom in June 2006. The government of Malta – the Mediterranean island that is one of the EU’s smallest member states – sold a 60% stake in the company to Dubai Holdings, with 40% floated on the Malta stock exchange.

But the newly independent Maltacom had to do more than that to compete against a cable operator that is also offering fixed telephony, in a market where customers are anyway starting to prefer to use their mobiles.

“I inherited a company that had been run by the government, with all that that means,” says Kay, who had worked for most of his career in Cable & Wireless, in Hong Kong, Latvia and most recently as CEO of the operation Macau, before joining the Dubai-owned Matacom.

His first task was to consolidate. “We had many finance departments, many network departments, many purchasing departments – we consolidated the whole thing,” says Kay.

The operation also had a successful, though separately run, mobile operation, called Go Mobile, and legally the wireline company and the wireless company were officially separate.

Different culture

“The wireless company had its own board and it was not allowed to recruit from the wireline company. It had a totally different culture. The wireless company is young and vibrant, with new ideas and energy. The other was the opposite, with government practices and procedures.”

But at an important part of the strategy that Kay identified early in the process was to rebrand the operation – and he commissioned a branding specialist based in the UK and Dubai to advise him.

“We were responsible for branding Dubai Holdings’ mobile operation in Dubai,” says Linda Garcia, Managing Director of Turquoise Branding. “As well as Du, we’ve worked with Telenet in Belgium, Telemar in Brazil and Pipex Wireless in the UK.” Turquoise became involved in Malta when there were still four companies in the Maltacom group.

“We had to stop fighting between ourselves and work under one banner,” says Kay. “So we looked for a single brand. We had a very good brand for the mobile side.”

Garcia agrees: “It was a fantastic name. We said just go with Go, and keep the name.” Moving away from having “Malta” in the name helped, she adds: “The ‘Malta’ prefix showed it was a state monopoly. It had those associations.”

On the other side, Maltacom “was seen as strong and reliable”, says Kay. “Both brands were very strong.”

The operator undertook some market research. “We ended up going with Go,” says Kay. There was a small change – a lowercase “go” was transformed into “GO”, he adds, “to include all the things Maltacom had”.

Clarity of the message

What’s the point of branding? Garcia is clear: “Telecoms operators are worried about the clarity of their message with more and more products and services,” she says. “With all the packages and offers and call plans it is confusion. So clarity and simplicity of the message is the key. You need to make sure your message is clear.”

Since the change, which has been followed in a change in the legal name of the company, “we’ve adopted the whole new attributes of the brand”, says Kay. “We’ve got to live up to those now.”

It wasn’t a matter of just choosing the new brand, but of implementing the changes throughout the company – right down to redesigning shops and some of the company’s vans, a few of which still carried the name that was in use before Maltacom. “Some were 20 years old and still had the old name of the side.”

Other tasks included staff uniforms and websites, notes Garcia. “There ‘s a lot of collateral that goes with rebranding.”

And the result? “You can imagine putting all that together in one go would have been a challenge,” says Kay.

But after the process has been completed, “we’re now uplifting the game of the fixed company”, he says. The process went “extremely well”, but as a result customers’ “expectations have gone through the roof,” he reports.

“People complain that we’re not doing stuff in half the time we did before, when it was regarded as quite acceptable.” That’s the consequence of not being seen as a government operator.

“You have got to watch it on these things. Expectations have gone up all round,” says Kay. “I can talk to our employees about competition and they’re seeing it. It has unified the organisation considerably. Things are now a lot better and we’ve recognised the enemy is more outside than in.”

Before the change there was an uncomfortable tendency to fight internal rivals. Now the focus has shifted to the real competition. And competition is tough, he notes. “We’re driven by the competition – it’s a very competitive market.”

The cable operator serves 100,000 households – in a country that has a total population of only 400,000, “and now they’re offering telephony, and they have a 3G licence.”

Mobile market share

Go Malta’s mobile operation is only seven years old, though in that time it has won a 49% market share, leaving Vodafone – much longer established in the island – with 51%. Now Go is starting to offer HSDPA services across the country, “and that’s taking off well,” says Kay.

Thanks to Kay and Garcia there might be unified branding, but is there a unifeied offer to the market?

“We’re looking to bundle the services,” says Kay, but he warns that the company is still the incumbent and so it is regulated in terms of what it can do. “We’ve got to be clearer with the regulator on what we’re charging,” he says. “We can’t cross-subsidise services.”

However, Go is “looking to offer double, triple and quadruple play services to our customers,” he adds. “That will give value to our customers.”

The company has acquired a digital terrestrial television service provider in order to add TV channels to its bundle.

“It means we’re challenging the cable company, which is attacking us on the telephony side,” says Kay. “We are highly regulated. The cable company is not. We are losing customers on the fixed side to cable. We are not allowed to match their prices.”

Meanwhile he complains that the company – serving a country that has a high dependence on the tourist trade – had been hit by the EU’s reduction in mobile roaming charges.

On the fixed side, Go Malta has upgraded many of its switches to IP. Broadband customers can get 28-30 megabits across most of the capital city, Valetta. “Once you move away from the distribution points it is more difficult,” he admits.

“The access network needs upgrading. We are able to provide very high speed in some places, and we do want a large IPTV offer.” At the moment only 35-40% of customers could effectively be served by IPTV and Go Malta is looking for ways to improve the infrastructure.

The company now ha a licence for WiMax which will allow it to offer a two-megabit service – suitable for internet though not for IPTV – in certain areas, “where it makes commercial sense to do so,” says Kay.

Streamlining

Meanwhile the process of streamlining the company after privatisation continues. We are looking at driving synergies from the companies and that will develop,” says Kay. There was an agreement with the government not to cut the labour force in the fixed operation for three years after privatisation, “and we’re now in the second year,” he notes: “We’re trying to downsize the company.”

But that doesn’t mean cuts right across all departments. “The commercial department in the fixed side was non-existent and has been revitalised,” he says. “We will be driving very hard.”

And, with its Dubai ownership come relationships with a variety of companies from western Europe to the Gulf, including Interoute, a London-based operator that runs a wholesale and business network across Europe – and has just installed a submarine cable connecting Italy to Malta.

Kay is looking for opportunities in data hosting, he says. “It’s a good solid solution for people who want hosting facilities offshore but within Europe. Data hosting has been continuing to grow.”

And he’s looking with interest at investments in knowledge cities in Dubai and other places. There’s an idea for Malta, he says.

01 April 2008 : Read more...

GO wins best brand in telecoms in UK-based awards.

The GO brand has landed the much-coveted Benchmarks Best Telecommunications brand award organised by Design Week of the UK. Malta’s leading quad-play telecom company managed to score a success in the Benchmarks 2007 telecommunications category and beat the competition such as BT Touch, Airwave and du. This was achieved thanks to the international branding consultancy firm, Turquoise Branding, who are responsible for GO’s new brand identity.

The Benchmarks Awards, now in their fourth year, are specifically designed to set a standard in the recognition of excellence focused on brand communication. They reward consistency of branding across an entire campaign and candidates are expected to demonstrate a strong strategic concept proven to work effectively across a number of platforms.

GO was felt to be the strongest entry with a very upbeat identity that reflected both the culture and geography of its audience, and the technological advances of the product offering. The cohesion across all applications of the brand from packaging to retail on screen and advertising was also felt to be particularly strong.

GO managed to satisfy all of these requirements, and much more. Turquoise handled the task of merging the positives of four companies – the national telecoms company Maltacom, internet broadband provider Maltanet, mobile networks GO Mobile and the digital TV platform Multiplus – developing them into a single brand geared to provide cut-through in a fast-growing market, able to hold its own against increasing international competition.

19 March 2008 : Read more...

Go wins Benchmarks Award with Turquoise.

The GO brand has landed the much-coveted Benchmarks Best Telecommunications brand award organised by Design Week of the UK. Malta’s leading quad-play telecom company managed to score a success in the Benchmarks 2007 telecommunications category and beat the competition such as BT Touch, Airwave and du. This was achieved thanks to the international branding consultancy firm, Turquoise Branding, who are responsible for GO’s new brand identity.

The Benchmarks Awards, now in their fourth year, are specifically designed to set a standard in the recognition of excellence focused on brand communication. They reward consistency of branding across an entire campaign and candidates are expected to demonstrate a strong strategic concept proven to work effectively across a number of platforms.

GO was felt to be the strongest entry with a very upbeat identity that reflected both the culture and geography of its audience, and the technological advances of the product offering. The cohesion across all applications of the brand from packaging to retail on screen and advertising was also felt to be particularly strong.

GO managed to satisfy all of these requirements, and much more. Turquoise handled the task of merging the positives of four companies – the national telecoms company Maltacom, internet broadband provider Maltanet, mobile networks GO Mobile and the digital TV platform Multiplus – developing them into a single brand geared to provide cut-through in a fast-growing market, able to hold its own against increasing international competition.

19 March 2008 : Read more...