VodacomCopied

Vodacom was South Africa's largest mobile operator, majority owned by Vodafone, which IOL said held 65 per cent. On 1 April 2011 it replaced its familiar blue and green identity with Vodafone's red. MyBroadband described the change as essentially cloning Vodafone's global branding while keeping the Vodacom name, and reported that Vodacom was understood to be the only Vodafone owned operator allowed to keep its name when rebranding. IOL noted that it also took on Vodafone's teardrop logo and the global slogan Power to You.

The launch was staged at the Vodacom Unlimited music festival at Orlando Stadium in Soweto. ITWeb reported that during the show the company switched to a live feed of Hillbrow's Ponte tower lit up in red, and that chief executive Pieter Uys joked that the rebrand was not an April Fool's joke and that the media could not keep a secret. Uys had said in February that Vodacom would spend R200 million on rebranding and improving the customer experience.

Uys insisted the colour was the smallest part. The change, he said, was the tip of the iceberg, the outside indication of a much bigger change. Bizcommunity quoted him saying the organisation had grown, the world had changed and customers had become more complex, so it was time to become a younger company. IOL reported he called the rebrand necessary because the company had become complex. Vodacom spent six months flattening its management, he told ITWeb, because it had become a company that took months to respond. The promised substance included more than 1,000 additional 3G base stations that year, redesigned stores and, through the closer Vodafone link, better roaming tariffs across the group's operations.

Adopting the parent's look is a sensible economy for a subsidiary, and the red teardrop is one of the strongest telecom symbols in the world. But keeping the Vodacom name while wearing the Vodafone uniform is an awkward half step: one letter apart, the names now read as a typo of each other. Vodacom's blue was a local institution; trading it for global red bought scale at the price of distinctiveness. The strategic changes behind the paint were real, which is why the result is defensible.