Orange Square Swallows One Fat Blue Donut

One is growing into Orange. There better be no political implication with that (in regard of the Nationalrat-election coming up next weekend), but other than this hope, I have to admit that I am a kind of geek stoked by what they will make out of this rebranding from fat-lettered one (the blue doughnut) into really simplistic orange square. I really liked their campaign and yesterday I just saw a really good spot. I look forward how they are going to reform the presentation (their font style, their ads, their leaflets) and the public image of Orange Austria.

The overall rebranding transformation will cost the France Telecom spin-off about 20 million Euro. You get a lot of ad space and TV spot slots for that. And I bet that plenty of people already heard that One is turning into Orange.

Other network providers (especially huge ones like T-Mobile and Hutchison 3G “Drei”) are going to be forced to make use of their partners and decrease the international calling fees. Orange is going to offer an “unlimited” (1000 min.) free calling plan for all EU countries including Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Norway. 25 EUR a month  (Hallo Europa). That’ll safe some people a lot of money and the idea of having a girlfriend down in Spain or up in Sweden is not too far-fetched at all.

I’m bound to T-Mobile, though, for another year and since I don’t usually call someone out of Austria, I still have a better plan, but still, this is going to force the big fish in the cellphone market to change their idea of international (European) calls. I wonder if you get charged a butt load of money if you have an Orange Austria plan and make calls in - say - Germany to - say - the UK… We’ll see what Orange’s homepage will tell us about that (Update: The link takes you right to the page that shows the roaming costs).