EE Rebranding Process

UK mobile phone operators Orange and T-Mobile who merged to become Everything Everywhere, later simplified their name to EE. As of 2016, EE is soaring in profits, seeing a 10% increase to over £6.5bn in revenue in the three years from 2010 to 2013. More recently EE was purchased by the UK communication giant British Telecom Group more commonly known as BT.

The success of EE’s new status as a highly successful mobile phone operator is underpinned by that of their successful rebranding strategy. This sentence itself is a relative contradiction as from the two years that followed from 2010, when Orange and T-Mobile merged the company traded under the brand name ‘Everything Everywhere’ this didn’t appear to catch on, rollout of this brand was slow, and to many people Orange and T-Mobile were trading exactly as they always have. Small trial concept Everything Everywhere stores were launched and the predicted feedback came back that the company was struggling to get the new brand across, a main element to cause this was the retaining of the Orange and T-Mobile branding within the stores. Rather than change, majority was kept the same and therefore caused the brand to lose focus and least analysts confused as to the real reason behind the half attempted rebrand.

In 2012 Everything Everywhere was again relaunched as EE shortening the brand name and creating a more striking branding presence that would be rolled out across the UK, the company legally retained Everything Everywhere as it’s legal name. Highstreets across the UK were assessed and where possible Orange and T-Mobile outlets were merged into larger joint stores now under the EE branding. Customers could still however continue their contracts and SIM cards under the Orange and T-Mobile branding but were gradually phased out in an effort to ease the transition with existing customers. New EE branding from Wolff Olins saw the launch of a distinct teal and yellow colour scheme set against a simple iconography and a distinct motion typeface all tying together in something they called the Smart Layer. This is a clever way of representing the performance of EE’s fast network and something they wanted to reinforce to their customers.