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Telstra boosts international brand recognition.

Telstra has retained its crown as Australia's most valuable brand despite a marginal decrease in brand value and a significant slump in enterprise value.

The formerly government-owned telecommunications giant, which is ranked 125th in Brand Finance's Global 500 most valuable brands list, remained Australia's top brand despite what was a challenging year for the company with a series of outages across its networks.

Telstra's brand value came in at $14.3 billion, down from $14.6 billion last year, but still enough to hold onto the top spot comfortably. In 2016, Telstra pipped Woolworths to top Brand Finance most valuable brand list.

Telstra's branding efforts among B2B decision-makers in the international market have made great strides. Its international brand recognition grew to 26% in 2015 from 10% in 2014. This growth was underpinned by a simpler go-to-market products and services strategy, backed by its success in integrating Pacnet's network with its own. It now has the right network and services capabilities to help grow the brand further internationally.

Telstra's new brand campaign demonstrates growing success

Not only does Telstra enjoy a large share of its domestic market, but also its international brand recognition is increasingly getting better. For instance, the service provider has grown its brand awareness in Asia-Pacific from 8% in 2014 to 32% in 2015. With the integration of key acquisitions such as Pacnet progressing well, Telstra has launched a new brand campaign with a focus on the magic of technology. This helps it improve the customer experience, which remains a key measure of its success, as well as helps it create better ways to empower everyone to thrive in a connected world.

Underpinning that is a desire to transform from being a telco to a technology company, and to be the architect of a "better way" to do things. This means that Telstra will focus on helping companies create transformative innovation, reach global markets, liberate the enterprise workforce, optimize IT, and secure networks.

The new brand campaign nicely complements modular products and services as they become available in the market. Enterprise customers can expect the following:

• A simpler customer engagement model. The new brand campaign highlights the ease of doing business with Telstra. Ovum believes this is accurate. By unifying product teams across geographies, international customers will have more of a voice in terms of service innovation, creation, and propagation. Moreover, management and support will become a more streamlined effort in the near to mid-term. Telstra is also investing in global service desk capabilities – this will make it easier for the service provider to support superior SLAs and better customer experiences.
• Telstra to drive greater innovation with Telstra Programmable Network. The brand promises to bring transformative innovation and help optimize IT for customers. This is reflected by Telstra's almost complete integration of Pacnet's network with its existing regional and global networks. The launch of the Telstra Programmable Network is the culmination of that effort. It is also using dedicated teams to migrate customers off Pacnet onto Telstra, or, where the Pacnet capability is superior, to migrate that component to the Telstra Programmable Network. It aims to complete customer migration in 2018. The Telstra Programmable Network's advantages are many, but key innovations that will guide its development include automated, on-demand, and real-time provisioning; ability to control the Telstra Programmable Network using UIs; a consumption-based model (pay per use); and the use of analytics to provide customers with data from the network and tools to interrogate and exploit the data.
• Mobility and securitycapabilities as key differentiators. Mobility and managed security services (MSS) sit across its modular international connectivity, platforms, and applications layers. While Telstra does not own international mobile networks, it offers managed mobile services including its IoT platform to regional and global customers with the aim that global customers will create IoT applications off its IoT platform. It has identified MSS as another key regional and global requirement, and it is adding key capabilities to its cybersecurity team. While some of the buildouts of global services (mobility, IoT, and managed security) are a work in progress, it intends to invest significantly in global product availability. Enterprises will see a more comprehensive buildout of MSS, mobility-as-a-service (MaaS), managed public cloud, and cloud contact center in the near to mid-term.