ORGA 433 – 460
Orange Telecom is a tremendous example of successful organizational understanding of change in a fast-paced and growing market. Utilizing the environment around them, Orange has grown into a worldwide triumph in the Telecom industry. By committing to a progressive strategy, Orange has demonstrated their ability to change and evolve to not only suit their immediate environment, but to also actively envision the future path of the industry, and capitalize on prospective trends around the world.
Question 1: Using the internet and other sources, as well as the information give in the case study, summarize the elements in Orange’s temporal and external environments in terms of the influence it had on the opportunity for this new brand to succeed, 1994-2006. Orange was launched in the UK in 1994 as an answer to the growing trend towards mobile telecommunications. From the very beginning, Orange utilized a strategy of pioneering many of the services to its customers that would later become the norm, industry-wide. At it’s launch, Orange was the first to offer standard customer service features such as caller id. Orange was the first company to offer aesthetically appealing masts shaped like trees which helped in customer relations. In 1999 Orange launched a branch in Switzerland which would be the first of many excursions into foreign markets. In 2000 Orange was able to use superior technology to offer Europe its first wireless video phone. These are just a few example of Orange’s strategy of providing customers with the latest in innovation. They launched at a time when Telecom services focused more on turnover than customer service. Orange decided to go in a completely unique direction by focusing primarily on customer concerns and service, being among the first to offer their customers numerous different option in every category such as prepaying phones through ATMs. In the UK, in 2003 Orange changed the way the
References: Senior, B. & Fleming, J. (2006). Organizational Change (3rd ed.). Essex, England: Pearson Education Limited.