Vodafone: Designing the Iconic Teleco Logo

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Vodafone Brand Identity

Designing the iconic ‘speech mark’ logo and identity. The story of ‘Talking Globally’ and creating the UK’s most valuable brand and the world’s largest mobile telecom service provider.

Designing the Vodafone logo has been a highlight of my career as a brand identity designer. The story began in 1997 with a simple brief and a very big corporate ambition. Vodafone were one of the pioneers and leading mobile telecoms service providers in the UK. But as the sector grew with increasing competition they realised their future success depended on aggressive global expansion with a goal of becoming the worlds largest mobile telecoms provider.

Based around an old-fashioned ‘techie’ typeface their original identity was outdated, meaningless and fragmented across a variety of sub-brands. I was asked to create a new brand identity that would cut-through competitors, resonate with customers and help Vodafone achieve their ambition for global domination.

See the case history at Propella®

Reliable, but far from exciting

Comprehensive customer research, an audit of the existing brand positioning revealed Vodafone were perceived as reliable, but far from exciting. Their identity was performing poorly and failing to connect with people. It lacked personality, was inconsistently applied and could not punch through a confusing array of sub-brands, each of which had their own brand. Competitors (like Orange) were performing better and seen as more youthful and forward looking.

The next step was to review Vodafone’s brand architecture which consisted of a plethora of sub-brands, products, services and retail brands. Vodafone needed a single monolithic brand that would give clarity and focus – one brand, one Vodafone.

Talking Globally and ‘owning’ speech

A competitive audit revealed a fascinating insight: that most telecom brands were styling themselves as if they were technology companies. This was curious given what they actually did was to connect people to talk. This key insight enabled me to reposition Vodafone, giving them ownership of speech and communication in all its forms. I defined this with the brand essence ‘Talking Globally’.

Creating the ‘speech mark’ logo

The design thinking was influenced by the idea of ‘Talking Globally’ and speech in general, but the trick was to avoid making it whimsical. By turning the counters (the holes) within the ‘o’s’ of Vodafone into speech marks the logo suggests the idea of people talking to each other. Then, by isolating the opening speech mark we made it the logo brand icon.

Vodafone look and feel

The new speech mark icon provided a distinctive shape which could be applied across the business, advertising and all communication channels. Vodafone red dominated the colour palette supported by a selection of vibrant colours. Typography was flexible; advertising headlines could be typeset in wide variety of wild and wonderful fonts to suggest the diversity of speech, language and accents heard across the network.

The number one team

Sponsorship was seen as a critical component to Vodafone achieving their ambition. Initially we launched the new Vodafone brand through sponsorship of the England Cricket Team and horse racing events. Following this, and to allude to Vodafone’s premier position we aligned them with the number one sports teams associated with the colour red. This led to multi-million dollar deals with Manchester United and Ferrari. Being part of the number one team was used to influence the acquisition of competitors, such as Omnitel (in Italy).

Global expansion and acquisition

To manage the visual transition of acquired brands to Vodafone I created a migration strategy. Acquired brands which had significant visual equity could be merged with Vodafone in bite-sized stages, such as the takeover of D2 Mannesmann in Germany. This acquisition became one of the largest hostile takeovers in corporate history.

Talking results

I am extremely proud of my work for Vodafone and that it is today recognised as an iconic logo design. I am also extremely proud of the results it has delivered to Vodafone, who within 24 months of relaunch Vodafone increased their growth from 38% to 540%, ultimately achieving their goal to be the worlds leading mobile telco. It is also considered to be the UK’s most valuable brand (worth approximately $40 Billion).

Whilst the brand application was adjusted slightly around 2010 (with a 3-Dimensional logo styling), my original speech mark idea remained the same. Vodafone have since returned to the flat-colour icon I created for them in 1998.