Here's the response Singtel's new logo drew

Yesterday, after 16 years, Singapore’s largest telco SingTel unveiled its brand new revamp along with a refreshed logo. With the change, the brand also repositioned itself with a brand promise “Let’s make everyday better.” According to Singtel’s group CEO Chua Sock Koong, this comes as the brand today grown from just being a telecoms company into a multimedia and ICT services.According to folks at Singtel, the rebrand has been underway for more than a year, and Singtel worked with its creative agency Ogilvy & Mather on the brand refresh.Branding experts said that the new logo was an improvement, but also questioned what the bigger aim was.Joseph Baladi, managing partner at BrandAsian said that there seemed to be an absence of any reference to the brand’s purpose in the new logo. He added that re-branding efforts are normally triggered by either the need to address consistent poor performance of a brand, the emergence of a profound new trend or insight that reflects a new landscape reality, and at present, Singtel's is not clear."All these are the whys in rebranding. From what I can see, the folks at Singtel are talking only about the “what” – new customer initiatives. That is all well and good but more accurately reflects the launch of a new communications campaign rather than a profound identity shift,” he said.However, Baladi said that the new logo was an improvement on the old one, where it comes to visuals.Katie Ewer, strategy director of JKR, also said that the redesign is long overdue and the current logo is cearly an improvement from the one it had before. “It made me slightly embarrassed to see the previous Singtel logo’s Times New Roman-esque typography emblazoned proudly across the Formula 1 tracks for all the world to see. The brief can be clearly read in the design response – I’d wager that words like ‘friendly’, and ‘connecting people’ and ‘journey’ were in the objectives given to the agency,” said Ewer.She added that the font is similar to one that Dell used when it tried to convince consumers of being a friendly brand rather than a “big scary corporate tech behemoth.”As for the public, some have poked fun at the new logo, while others were happy about the promotions Singtel was offering on the back of the new branding.Here are a few we spotted online:https://twitter.com/funkshin/status/557743398103552000https://twitter.com/gurms/status/557781762064269312https://twitter.com/idholland/status/558068234944266241https://twitter.com/richardjang/status/558016049468035073