Envirofone brand manager discusses new logo and strategy
Jon Butler, creative brand manager for mobile phone recycling company Envirfone talks to The Drum about its new brand and the company's plans to dominate the European industry.
The Drum spoke to creative brand manager Jon Butler about the need for a new logo and the company’s plans for the brand to dominate the European industry.
As part of its push to dominate both the UK and then the European phone recycling business, having recently begun trading in Sweden, the company launched its first TV advertising campaign last month.
The TV campaign, produced by The Gate Films, saw online auditions held to recruit its actors.
That campaign will be used across Sweden, Germany, France and then the Netherlands, explains Butler, re-edited to feature the language of each country, in order to create 'dedicated' campaigns.
As a result of the European push, the company felt it needed to change its logo from the garish orange colour it had begun life with.
“If we were ever going to change our logo, now was the time before we roll out into Europe,” says Butler. “The old logo was getting quite dated and this was a really good opportunity to enhance the brand and make it a lot fresher and cleaner.”
Having used its in-house design team, as well as some freelance consulting, 90 logos were produced, which, through the use of focus groups, saw the eventual identity chosen to lead the brand forward into Europe.
“This has a bit of personality with the speech bubble on it, so we moved it out online, across Flash banners and animations, it lends itself quite well to that. It also helps with our product expansion as we move into Satellite Navigation Systems and iPods, we’ve got a way of changing the colours and changing the speech bubble to incorporate product expansion into it,” adds Butler.
The brand will now use a variety of marketing mediums featuring the new logo within the TV campaign. Outdoor will roll out in the coming months for the summer marketplace while online will be another key focus.
The website has also been redeveloped internally to feature the branding and create a more accessible experience for online mobile phone recyclers.
Envirofone is currently just one brand, albeit one of the major brands, in a heavily competitive UK marketplace, although Butler believes that the number of companies will decrease in the next year.
“It seems to be between us and Mazuma which are leaps and bounds in front of everyone. It’s going to be very hard for anyone else to get a share of voice. They would have to have a very big marketing spend to get in there really. One competitor released a TV advert and we’ve not seen any real take up on their traffic and they’ve disappeared after a few months, so unless they’re willing to throw millions at a TV campaign in a couple of months. In Europe we have one main competitor which is Zonzoo so we’re obviously trying to get out there as quickly as possible to do a land grab,” concludes Butler.