Title	A BRAND IDENTITY STRIPPED TO THE CORE
Brand	TELENOR NORWAY
Product/Service	TELENOR YNG
Category	A01. Creation of a new Brand Identity
Entrant	ANTI Oslo, NORWAY
Idea Creation	ANTI Oslo, NORWAY

Name	Company	Position
Behnam Farazollahi	ANTI	Brand Director
Erik Johan Worsøe Eriksen	ANTI	Senior designer
Daniel Lied	ANTI	Designer
Janicke Sæther	ANTI	Account manager
Kjetil Wold	ANTI	CCO
Henrike Øistad	Telenor	Inhouse designer
Thomas Raddum	Telenor	Design Manager
Thomas Barre	Telenor	Head of Telenor YNG
Kristin Argel-Jensen	Telenor	Brand Manager
Sigve Aspelund	Tinagent	Photographer

Background

Telenor was established over a century ago as Norway’s state telecoms company. Its rich history as a nation builder helped it to become Norway’s largest telecoms operator. The brand enjoys over 90% recognition with consumers, is considered solid, reliable, family-friendly and of high quality but isn’t always seen as the most affordable or progressive. In the past Telenor employed its youth brand Djuice to attract younger customers but have now introduced Telenor Young to nurture a clearer path towards Telenor for its 18- to 28-year-old customers, increasing market share and safeguarding brand awareness and loyalty into the future. The challenges Telenor have faced will be familiar to many large brands today: to engage Millennials and digital natives without jeopardising a well-established brand image. The main objective for the project was to establish a clear connection to the main Telenor brand, as well as to bolster and enrich its image.

Describe the creative idea

Stripped to the core. Insights from several in-depth focus groups and discussions indicated that the target group responded best to clear, concise and direct messages which they perceived to be more honest and engaging. They were tired of the usual marketing tricks brands tend to use to attract their attention. With this in mind we developed a stripped down visual universe with effective, useful and simple tools. We even went so far as to remove the iconic blue colour, which is at the heart of the main Telenor brand. Telenor Young’s identity is built upon the idea of ‘unbranding’ as a design principle. This is a concept that makes room for those aspects that the target audience believes to be most important: the offers themselves and their unique benefits.

Describe the execution

By stripping the communication elements to their core across all touch points, we made each offering clearer and more candid, using concise and plain language. We combined a stripped-back colour palette and a cut-and-paste aesthetic with no-nonsense copywriting, devoid of corporate smalltalk. Texts are presented in a monospaced font that’s reminiscent of bare-bones coding itself. Even the word Young is abbreviated to yng, to bolster its no-time-to-waste attitude. The sum of all these parts is a comprehensible, commercial visual identity with a clear focus on what matters the most: the content itself.

List the results

The design and visual identity has helped Telenor Yng reach a brand awareness of a stunning 90% at the end of December 2017 (50 percentage points above target). The knowledge of benefits has been measured at 31%. More importantly, the preference for the Telenor mother brand among digital natives increased by 46%, increasing 22% compared with the same time last year. In short, the perception of the Telenor brand has been significantly enhanced within the 18–28-year-old target group. Ultimately this has resulted in Telenor reaching their ambitious business goals. In short, Telenor Yng has become an immediate success and has provided Telenor with an increasingly strong relationship with digital natives.