ZTECopied

At the end of 2014, marking the company's 30th anniversary, it unveiled a redesigned logo and a new slogan, Tomorrow never waits. ZTE USA showed it off on 30 December at a Golden State Warriors game in Oakland, with chairman Lixin Cheng saying the US, and the Bay Area in particular, was one of the first places the company wanted to introduce it.

The official framing was strategic. ZTE said the identity was aligned with its M-ICT strategy, a bet that mobile connectivity and cloud technology would merge telecoms and IT and connect huge numbers of new devices. Chief executive Shi Lirong claimed the strategy opened a market worth 3.5 trillion US dollars, ten times the 350 billion dollar telecoms market, and said the heart of it was a new company culture that customers would see in employees' actions in the months ahead.

The design was explained through a slogan of its own. ZTE said the logo's rounded form and lighter colour matched a new philosophy called CGO, for Cool, Green and Open, meant to drive innovations that are dynamic and youthful, sustainable, and open and collaborative. TWICE reported that the identity was meant to create more consumer focused branding, as the group put more emphasis on mobile internet and consumers across telecoms, enterprise computing and devices. GSMArena called the new mark noticeably sleeker than the one it replaced; its commenters were less charitable.

The context matters. ZTE was by then a major phone supplier in the US, which TWICE noted was the fourth largest supplier of mobile devices there, and it was sponsoring NBA teams as their official smartphone. A business to business engineering brand needed to look like something people would want in their pockets.

The result does that, up to a point. Rounding the letters and lightening the colour made ZTE look friendlier and more contemporary, and it sat more comfortably on handsets. But Cool Green Open is the kind of internal acronym that rarely survives contact with customers, and the mark itself is a careful tidy up rather than a distinctive idea. For a company trying to become a consumer brand, it was a necessary step, not a decisive one.