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The name of the company that is known to customers under the commercial brand O2 is Telefónica UK Limited. The trading name is stylized as O2 and used in the brand identity to make it look more memorable.
Meaning and history
The logo history of one of the largest providers of telecommunications services in the UK, a subsidiary of the Spanish Telefónica, is inseparably connected with the history of the company itself and reflects it.
The brand O2 started as Cellnet in 1985. It was BT Group and Securicor’s joint venture. Their first logo was a cluster of seven hexahedrons that formed some cell structure resembling a flower with the wordmark “Cellnet” below it, everything in black.
Three years later the company altered their mark. They made the hexahedrons white, added some kind of shadow to them and slightly modified the font.
In 1990 the brand identity was modernized. Now it was a stylized symbol with an image that resembled a dish antenna and the name of the company next to it. The color palette was blue and black.
The 1999 Emblem
In 1999 there arose a need for rebranding as BT Group gained Securicor’s share of the company. The logo reflected the new name “BT Cellnet”. It included the wordmark “BTcellnet” paired with a stylized upper torso of a human figure in two colors, red and blue. The “BT” was in blue and in caps while the letters “cellnet” were in red and lowercase, though the same in size as the “BT”.
Current Symbol
The next renaming was in 2002. A new holding company was formed ‒ mmO2 plc, and the BT Cellnet consumer brand became O2.
Despite being extremely laconic, the emblem attracts attention and sticks in the mind. What makes it so memorable is that the company makes use of the chemical symbol known to everybody ‒ O2, the symbol for an oxygen molecule, especially when it is accompanied by the slogan “It’s your O2”. The idea behind O2 is based on the fact that for consumers mobile phones are “indispensable for life”, just like oxygen.
The logo does not accentuate that it is a mobile phone company but lays stress on what customers can do. It has turned out to be motivating, judging by the fact that the key performance metrics of the company have improved.
Color
The logo appears either in blue color on no background or in white on the blue background. The choice of the color seems natural as oxygen is envisaged as something blue. And it is really blue in liquid and solid forms.
