Podium Success for Openreach: Unveiled as one of the UK’s Top ‘Superbrands’
Openreach recognised for quality of service, reliability, and distinction of brand
Openreach, the UK’s digital network business, is celebrating after being named one of the UK’s top ‘Superbrands’ - an accolade granted by The Academy of Chief Marketers and Superbrands UK as part of its annual Superbrands survey.
The Superbrands survey celebrates brands that have established an expectational reputation in its field and are the best examples of brands leading the way in the UK.
Unlike many industry awards, brands can’t pay or apply to be considered. Instead, two separate judging panels are tasked with reducing a list of 3,200 brands to a shortlist of the strongest 1,600 across 64 categories. Brands are marked on the quality and reliability of their products or services and their distinction (being well-known and suitably different to their competitors). From this shortlist, the most highly regarded brands in each category are awarded ‘Superbrands’ status.
Openreach is a wholly owned but legally separate entity from the BT Group with its own independent board. In 2018, as part of a series of commitments to the UK communications regulator, Ofcom, Openreach set out to bring a new independent brand and remove all references to BT from its identity within three years. Having successfully completed this process one year ahead of schedule, the brand continues to go from strength to strength and has an exciting future where it will look to work more closely with all Communication provider partners to support on their marketing and communications.
Damon Segal, Co-founder of The Academy of Chief Marketers and CEO of Superbrands UK, commented: “We are delighted that Openreach has achieved Superbrands status this year. Openreach has established the finest reputation in its field based on quality, reliability, and distinction. It has been recognised by consumers to offer significant emotional and/or tangible advantages over its competitors.”
Welcoming the news, Scott Room, Director of Brand and Digital at Openreach, said: “The Superbrands survey has been highlighting the best brands in the UK for over 25 years and it’s a fantastic achievement for our new brand to have been recognised alongside long-established ones including previous recipients such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix and Nike.
“When we launched the Openreach brand, it was a fresh slate. We transformed the brand, from the way we talk, to the way we act, and this allowed us to build relationships with all our customers equally. We’ve since rolled out an extensive transformation programme, rebranding everything including more than 40 offices, nearly 28,000 vans and all of our communications channels, but most importantly we’ve begun to embed a new culture. This has helped make Openreach one of the best places to work, something we’re immensely proud of and has helped us to earn a spot on the ‘Sunday Times Best 25 Big Companies’ in the UK in 2020.
To find out more about Openreach visit www.openreach.com
Openreach Limited is the UK’s digital network business.
We’re more than 35,000 people, working in every community to connect homes, schools, shops, banks, hospitals, libraries, mobile phone masts, broadcasters, governments and businesses – large and small – to the world.
Our mission is to build the best possible network, with the highest quality service, making sure that everyone in the UK can be connected.
We work on behalf of more than 665 communications providers like BT, SKY, TalkTalk, Vodafone, and Zen, and our broadband network is the biggest in the UK, passing more than 31.8m premises.
Over the last decade we’ve invested more than £15 billion into our network and, at more than 190 million kilometres – it’s now long enough to wrap around the world 4,798 times.
Today we’re building an even faster, more reliable and future-proof broadband network which will be the UK’s digital platform for decades to come. We’re making progress towards our full fibre optic network target to reach 25 million premises by December 2026. Research shows a nationwide Full Fibre network could potentially provide a £59bn boost to UK productivity.
To help build the new fibre network and deliver better service across the country – we’ve created and filled more than 9,000 apprenticeship roles in the last two years and we’re recruiting another 1,000 trainee roles in Openreach in 2021. We’re also building greener – we operate the UK’s second largest commercial fleet and want to help lead the transition to electric vehicles, with a target to transition our fleet to being electric in 2030.
Openreach is a highly regulated, wholly owned, and independently governed unit of the BT Group. More than 90 per cent of our revenues come from services that are regulated by Ofcom and any company can access our products under equivalent prices, terms and conditions.
For the year ended 31 March 2021, we reported revenue of £5,244m.
For more information, visit www.openreach.co.uk
