T-Mobile, has faced a difficult few years, losing a lot of customers due to the absence of an official iPhone in its lineup, and with the AT&T buyout failing due to regulatory hurdles. Long story short, the No. 4 carrier in the US is now scrambling to become relevant again, in a race dominated by carrier powerhouses AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint.
Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s parent company, will invest over $4 billion in its American operations to erect a 4G LTE network. In the meanwhile, the company hopes to complete the rollout of its HSPA+ “4G” network, which is more akin to an advanced 3G technology than true 4G. There are also plans to pump up $200 million in advertising spending.
T-Mobile is seemingly going all in with the release of the HTC One S, with a huge launch party taking place in New York later this week. Similar to Microsoft’s “Smoked by a Windows Phone” and Nokia’s “Smartphone Beta Test” campaigns, T-Mobile is launching a “test drive” website, aiming to prove the superiority of the HTC One S against its competition. However, I don’t see the One S, or any other device in T-Mo’s lineup being “superior” to AT&T’s HTC One XL or Sprint’s HTC EVO 4G LTE so I’m looking forward to seeing how T-Mobile is going to play this.
Along with this promotional blitz, T-Mobile has decided to go with a complete re-branding of its image. In an interview with AllThingsD, senior VP Peter DeLuca mentions that the carrier is preparing for a brand refresh later in the year, stating that “We really can’t wait until the end of the year to make some noise in the market.”
The first step in this re-branding is to change the image of the T-Mobile spokeswoman Carly Foulkes, who has appeared in almost every T-Mobile advert since 2010. Carly, best known as “the girl in the pink dress” will be discarding said pink dress in favor of leather and a Ducati.
The new soon-to-be-aired ad spots will primarily feature the HTC One S for now. I’m not entirely sure about what this change signifies. Is it T-Mobile’s attempt to portray a “good girl gone bad” image (wait, what?) or is the Ducati symbolic of how fast new T-mobile devices and their network is going to be?
Either way, wow. Doesn’t she look absolutely stunning in leather?
