Part one : Nobody ever kept the SIM packaging

In the first part of this eight part series we ask ‘why successful telecom branding is the region’s biggest unclaimed asset’?

People queue overnight for handsets. They photograph the box before they open it. Some of them keep the box for years, in a drawer, for no reason they could ever explain to you. Nobody, anywhere, has ever kept the packaging their SIM card came in.

That single observation tells you almost everything about why successful telecom branding is so rare, so difficult and so extraordinarily valuable to the operator brave enough to attempt it.

As a brand architect and occasional ‘brand evangelist’ I am often surprised and delighted by the fast adoption of brands by Middle Eastern consumers. We love brands here and are keen to adopt them and make our mark with them, because they are powerful ‘quick signifiers’ of social status.

If you own a feature phone you are considered a disconnected laggard with low social standing, whereas a smartphone puts you into the social-media middle class. Sport a Vertu or Porsche phone however and you could create the perception you have more money than sense. In other words, brands tell you a lot about a person and inspire desire, which translates into value and revenue.

Brand hunger, meet brand indifference

So how does brand hungry consumer smartphone adoption correlate with successful telecom branding know-how? Simply put: not so much.

Telcos in the Middle East are so busy competing with each other, neutralising offers and indulging in other forms of commercial chest beating, that they never commit to or invest in building their only really ownable asset – their brand. It is a strange thing to watch. An entire industry surrounded by the most brand hungry consumers on earth, and almost none of it spent on the one thing those consumers actually respond to.

In the intangible world of telecoms the brand is the only differentiator. At a consumer level it is the loyalty generator. At the level of corporate partnerships it is the door opener and the dealmaker. It creates desire and it builds belief. A telco with no brand is just the commodity broker of invisible connectivity that relies on the brand strength of innovative devices to drive sales. Not a great foundation on which to build sustainable value.

The uncomfortable premise

Which brings us to the thing nobody in the boardroom wants to say out loud, and the premise on which all successful telecom branding rests. You are selling something nobody can see, hold or show to their friends. Your product has no weight, no smell, no finish and no shelf presence. It arrives as a signal and it leaves as a bill.

“What is essential is invisible to the eye.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Saint-Exupéry meant it as a consolation. For an operator it is a warning. Invisible things are not automatically valued, they are simply easier to forget, and the whole discipline of successful telecom branding exists to solve exactly that problem.

The lack of physicality in the telco’s offer is a real issue – but it can be overcome. Not with a bigger campaign. With presence, with narrative and above all with something I have come to call brand texture.

Next in part two: what brand texture actually is, why Pizza Express has a great deal of it and Yahoo almost none, and why the industry’s favourite cost saving quietly strips it away.