SmartfrenCopied

Indonesian operator Smartfren never announced its 2019 logo. detikInet's Adi Fida Rahman and Suara.com both reported in December 2019 that the company had quietly given its logo a new touch, visible in the typeface and in a square added at the end of the wordmark.

Deputy CEO Djoko Tata Ibrahim explained the silence on 9 December 2019, after the launch of an eSIM service for the iPhone 11 in Jakarta. Because only the letterforms had changed, he said, the company did not think it needed publicising, and people would get used to it over time. The square was a deliberate choice over a circle. Djoko said it was meant to feel solid and stable and to suit the company's market of young people and millennials, adding that the aim was to be more agile, more down to earth and closer to millennials, who he said make up 70 percent of Smartfren's market.

There is something refreshingly honest about a telecom executive admitting the change was too small to bother announcing. It is also a tell. A logo update that, as Suara.com put it, many people did not notice was either very well judged or barely worth doing, and the stated rationale leans toward the second. Squares do not mean stability to anyone outside a branding deck, and claiming a geometric full stop makes a carrier more agile and down to earth is the kind of reasoning that can justify any shape at all. Picking a square because a circle felt less steady is a decision about taste dressed up as strategy.

Still, the restraint deserves credit. Smartfren did not burn money on a launch campaign for a typeface tweak, and it did not pretend a new full stop was a new company.