The end of an Era

At 11:51 on Monday morning, I got an SMS - as did millions of other users of Era mobile phones - that the brand is no longer. We shall have to get used to calling it T-Mobile.

This must be one of the most expensive re-branding exercises in corporate Poland. Tuesday's Gazeta Wyborcza was published on T-Mobile pink paper, a full-page ad on every other page in the front half of the main section. Happy people, soap bubbles. Billboards everywhere with the same images.

It will take months to change all the shops, franchised points-of-sale, stationary and software (five days on, and my phone still identifies the network with the old name, for instance).

I'm not a fan of such splurges on re-branding. Much of the ad spend is completely unnecessary - I mean what do we, the users, who pay significant bills each month, have to say about it? Some corporate control-freak on the T-Mobile board determines that it is to be done - and that's it.

I remember when Commercial Union Polska rebranded itself, in a similar global exercise, Aviva. There was a huge billboard, several stories high, on ul. Puławska by Wałbrzyska, with the new logo. As the bus I was on approached it, I heard a middle-aged man in front of me explain it to his fellow-passenger as follows. "Commercial Union has had a hard time during this economic crisis and now some unknown Spanish insurer has bought the whole company". As it was, Commercial Union/Aviva was, at the time, running Poland's second largest pension fund.

I doubt that the growth of Orange, one of T-Mobile's competitors on the Polish mobile telephony market, made much headway as a result of re-branding itself from Idea, itself a re-branding from Centertel, the operator's original name.

Things change. One must get used to that. So many British brands that I associate so intimately with my West London childhood have disappeared for good - AEC buses (the iconic Routemaster, built in Southall, a few miles from our Hanwell home), the Vickers and de Havilland aircraft that flew into Heathrow Airport for BEA and BOAC, the Morris, Austin, Triumph, Hillman, Singer, Humber and Standard cars that would be seen on British roads. Those brands have gone - merged, swallowed up or plain gone bankrupt - yet buses, aircraft and cars are seen in greater numbers than ever.

Remember it this way...

When I got my Era number - oooh, 12 years ago now, it was a company phone, all employees where I then worked had Era. So bad was reception, so patchy the coverage, so unreliable the handsets and so huge the bills, we'd call the network 'CholEra'. Since then, the operator has (because of the tremendous competition in this market*) brought about incredible improvements in service. So I can't say I have any major gripes today.Will the change to T-Mobile affect levels of customer satisfaction positively or adversely? We shall see. I can't say as a user (and payer of my children's phone bills too) that I'm too happy with the size and cost of the re-branding.

* Wherever there's tremendous competition in Poland, things generally work. Wherever there isn't - viz. the public sector - they generally don't.

This time last year:
Lost and lamented link

This time two years ago:
Over Jeziorki

This time three years ago:
The day the bus caught fire

This time four years ago:
Beautiful light on a stormy evening