OdidoCopied

T-Mobile Netherlands and Tele2 mobiel continue as a single new brand, Odido. The company's newsroom described an independent Dutch brand looking for a better balance between people and technology, built on the idea that everyone should be able to take part in what technology makes possible.

Adformatie reported that the repositioning had been prepared in deep secrecy for a year and a half. Two senior executives told the magazine that the decision to merge the two brands was taken a year earlier, together with the two investment funds that bought T-Mobile Netherlands, including Tele2, in early 2022 for 5.1 billion euros.

The new brand covered consumers and business customers and came with a new logo, a new brand colour made of several colours flowing into one another, and a new tagline, Het kan ook zo, roughly: it can also be done like this. The smaller sister brands Simpel and Ben remained, while Tele2 Thuis was to be phased out. The newsroom said the brand would introduce new products, including unlimited data subscriptions.

Abandoning T-Mobile magenta in the Netherlands was unavoidable once the German parent sold the business; the licence logic decided that. The interesting choice is what replaced it. Rather than claim one colour, as every operator does, Odido uses them all in soft gradients. That neatly sidesteps the telecom colour war, though gradients are the decade's default way of looking human and digital at once.

Odido's newsroom gave the scale: about 8 million customers, and a plan to become the largest provider of 100 per cent fibre internet in the Netherlands, reaching more than 6 million households. Chief executive Søren Abildgaard called it a radical repositioning in which technology is not central and everything revolves around people, because the degree to which you can participate in technology determines the degree to which you can participate in society. A people-first promise from a telecom is easy to say. The new name at least gives Odido a clean slate on which to prove it.

The name is the bolder bet: invented, palindromic in feel, easy to say in Dutch. A homegrown brand is a sensible story for a business that just became Dutch owned.