We are open – no, we’re not: Sprint launches a new brand and hides a new blog
Giving up control is difficult. Last week the US mobile phone company Sprint Nextel unveiled a new brand, Xohm, for its much-anticipated next-generation wireless broadband WiMax service. With the new brand Sprint also seems to be trying to shed its "our way or the highway" heritage, shared with wireless carriers around the globe who have defined their business models around absolute control of their networks and the devices that use them.
Or maybe Sprint is just trying to shed whatever brand yuckiness accounted for the company’s 95 percent drop in profits and the loss of 714,000 customers in the previous three quarters.
One of the ways Sprint is trying to open up is symbolic – by changing the way it tells its story. Sprint has launched a new blog to share at least some of the company’s internal thinking about its new broadband service. Through the blog Sprint is thinking out loud about what it means to be a carrier that both controls and profits from a network and yet is open to unhindered and unimagined uses for that network.
The blog also gives the company a place to acknowledge and think out loud about unfavorable feedback to the new brand name, like this from CrunchGear:
It xounds like “home” but with a z and the reaxon there’s an x in there ix becauxe “The X-factor makes it cool.” Mmmhmm.
(iFOCOS says: Xohm ryhmes with ohm, or with the sound of a cat expelling a fur ball).
Strange thing, though. Last week the Xohm blog was linked from the Xohm promotional web site, which otherwise has nothing of use to anybody other than an email signup for Xohm alerts. This week, the blog link is gone – although the blog itself is still alive and kicking. Which makes you wonder if the mild blowback over the (insert coughing sound – xmmm) brand provoked second thoughts on the whole blog idea within Sprint. If so, allow us to offer some third thoughts: put the link back and relax.
