August 14, 2007 at 12:51 pm · Authored by Ewan · Filed under Mobile Services, SMS

Following up on Alex’s earlier post:

THIS:

BECOMES THIS:

First, the formal news. 82ASK, the answering service, has just completed a 4-month re-brand to ‘Texperts’ (www.texperts.com).

Second, last night I was running around London with the Texperts team, documenting their surprising launch strategy. While many companies might choose to hold a little party complete with M&S cakes and some lemonade, Texperts Chief Executive, Sarah McVittie, (a triathlon runner, no less) had other ideas.

Why the change?

82ASK was one of the most recognised mobile services in the United Kingdom. Ask someone on the street - a normob (”normal mobile user”) - if they could name a mobile service and invariably, they’d reply with 82ASK… and nothing else, such was the brand penetration.

Talking to many people across the industry, the universal opinion on the re-brand was the wireless equivalent of a plumber exhaling strongly through his teeth as he looks at your leaking boiler.

Why would you want to dump a brand with such super consumer awareness in a marketplace where so many mobile services struggle to gain popular traction?

Simple. Freshly funded and with a big mandate and even bigger personal expectations, Sarah and her team want to spread the word further. To do that requires above-the-line advertising and promotion — and to do this effectively — you need an identity that is easily transferred across multiple mediums. 82ASK fails at the first hurdle here.

Whether it’s radio, print, online or on mobile, 82ASK was definitely a memorable brand that included the shortcode — and that certainly made sense to the geeks amongst the population.

Spell out 8-2-A-S-K on your phone and you’ve got the shortcode.

Hold a moment. Sat in the back of the car facing Sarah, debating the re-brand, she challenged me to tell her the shortcode digits for 82ASK off the top of my hand.

Stuttering with my brow furrowed, I confess, I had to get my handset out and start peering at numbers and letters. I knew ‘A’ was ‘2′… but then I was stumped. (It’s actually 82275).

And in that moment I was sold on the re-brand. Yup. You can’t go to market with an above-the-line advertising campaign and expect consumers to understand the alphanumeric translation. Hugely popular in America.. just not in the UK.

The new shortcode is uber-memorable: ‘66000′ in the United Kingdom.

Why the name Texperts? Over to the Texperts blog for an explanation:

Recently, we noticed that a groundswell of people began to rely on our Texperts - the fabulously clever “text experts” who form the heart of our service - for their daily information needs. Customers also really valued the fact that there was a highly skilled person handling their specific question. Our new name reinforces the importance of the company’s greatest assets, the Texperts who constantly delight our customers with prompt, brilliant service, 24/7/365. Our new emphasis gave us the opportunity to choose a new number, and we’ve found that 66000 is significantly more user-friendly than our old one (although 82275 will still work).

The focus of our service has evolved over time from being a trivia-driven service to an information-driven human resource, and we feel that our new name reflects the power of knowledge that we have working behind it. Everything you loved about 82ASK is still there, but we’ve bundled it all up into a shiny new identity to make the service bigger, better, and more accessible than ever!

I was out until 5am last night covering the 82ASK –> Texperts re-brand…