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At last the worst brand in technology is killed off, with the arrival of Virgin Media. In their own rights, NTL and Telewest weren’t exactly exciting brands, be it in terms of their logo, advertising or customer perception. When they merged I cringed that they took the safe-but-dull approach and created NTL:Telewest. Such combined brand names stink of fear, safety and lack of consumer understanding.

Now that Sir Richard Branson is part of the mix, since the takeover/merger of Virgin Mobile, he’s shaken things up in the old Branson style. Virgin Media was launched yesterday in a typical Virgin publicity stunt, with Branson arriving in Covent Garden on a horse drawn carraige alongside Dita Von Tesse (whom he at one point threw over his shoulder!), before taking up residence in a plastic box. Yes, a clear plastic box, a la David Blaine.

The multi-millionaire entrepeneur was then visited by several high-profile stars during the day. Apparently he was back there this morning sipping his morning tea.

Such publicity is something that only a true great like Branson can pull off. He understands how brands work and leverages the most he can from the press. His peers on the Virgin Media board must be looking at him and wondering what they are doing wrong, because it’s fairly certain that most people now believe Branson to be the head of this company.

The mass advertising has alraedy begun, with Uma Thurman fronting a £20m campaign to get people to sign up for ‘quadplay’, an industry term that seems to have leaked into public usage. It sounds fancy, but it just means that one brand is offering four different services - mobile, fixed line, broadband and TV. Most of the others only offer ‘triple play’ and are missing one or other component.

Virgin Media hopes that its brand strength will lead to consumers using more than one of the four offerings, rather than different companies for each. In most cases this is a dream often not realised (by the triple-play companies), but with the Virgin brand behind it anything is possible.

Virgin Media currently has about 3m subscribers (inherited from the NTL Telewest merger), and plans for 4m by 2010. Seems like a modest target, but with Freeview increasing its offer this year, it’s a tough market to make inroads into.

Virgin Media chairman Jim Mooney said: “Virgin Media is better by far than what the competition has to offer.” Quite a bullish statement for a newly rebranded organisation.
He added: “Our competitors have never had to deal with the Virgin brand coming down their tailpipe before and deal with the competition of customer services getting better and better week after week.” How the Virgin brand will instantly transform their customer services is anyone’s guess.