Formed in June 2000, Azzurri has to date acquired 12 businesses, 600 employees and increased its turnover from zero to £90 million. It has achieved this through a ruthless ‘buy-and-build’ strategy which was adopted from its inception and meant that newly-bought regional companies were integrated into the brand within three months. Azzurri is an independent reseller in converged voice, data, consultancy, networking, digital, print and mobile applications.
The decision to unite all the companies within the Azzurri group under one name and brand required a single, coherent, strong brand system. To this end, creative agency Start was brought in and charged with developing the brand image and producing brand guidelines, brochure and print materials. Ian Bennett, group marketing director at Azzurri, comments, “Start provided the branding tools to integrate the acquired businesses quickly and effectively. This is a key element of creating a single integrated company that optimises shareholder value.”
Combining and simplifying
With a customer base including Reuters, London Stock Exchange, Shell, Trinity Mirror and Waterstones, Azzurri needed a convincing brand proposition. Particular attention was paid to the web offering as the company sees itself as being at the forefront of new technology. The concept behind the website was based on a reflection of Azzurri’s core businesses – voice and data – and these were summoned up to deliver a strong overall message. The voice side is represented through quotes and propositions and data side through statistics.
The marketing literature has been designed to express the simplicity and optimism of the Azzurri brand focusing on the personal side and the ultimate end of helping people to work together more effectively. The design and layout has a bold, crisp and professional layout featuring Azzurri’s azure blue corporate colour. Striking photographic imagery of contemporary business people and environments is used to assert the company’s key values. Joe Doyle, group marketing communications manager at Azzurri, comments, “Start improved accessibility by humanising our complex and technical offer with people-focused photography rather than cold product shots of hardware – fundamentally that’s what Azzurri is about: people.”
Another challenge of the rebrand was encompassing all of the company’s offerings under one banner. With an extremely broad product portfolio gained through its acquisitions, a new modular approach to product sheets has become necessary. Start designed and developed different formats covering solutions for contact centres, data, voice, mobile and 118 218 services.
With top-end partners including Avaya, BT, Citrix, Mitel and Samsung, Azzurri realised that optimising these relationships was necessary. To address this, Start produces partner sheets on a continual basis explaining to customers the benefits of Azzurri’s partnerships.
Fruits of labour
Ian Bennett comments, “Interestingly, there has been greater benefit than we had originally anticipated by integrating the companies so quickly. By acquiring and integrating companies under a single brand within a short space of time, they entirely buy into Azzurri’s positioning and organic growth culture. Indeed the branding really helps drive the internal communications.”
Azzurri has been recognised by The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 (STTT100) as one of the fastest and largest telecoms resellers in the UK. It has also recently won the Best Management Team at the STTT100 awards and its CEO, Martin St Quinton, was awarded the Ernst & Young, Technology Entrepreneur of the Year.
Joe Doyle comments, “In a very crowded market place, we wanted something that gave us stand-out amongst our competitors. Everything we communicated had to be clear and concise. Start was able to crystallise our message, and began by giving us a simple but strong positioning statement and a strap line that complimented our logo.”
