Stories for Work

Chapter 15 Spark case study

New Zealand’s biggest telecommunications company, Spark, provides digital services to millions of New Zealanders and thousands of Kiwi businesses. It is one of the country’s largest listed companies, and is home to over 5000 employees spread across the country.

In 2013, Spark (formerly Telecom) took a big leap into the unknown, committing to a three-year business turnaround plan to transform itself and seeking to play an even bigger role in New Zealand’s digital future. The scale of the transformation has been enormous — some say one of the largest in New Zealand’s business history.

The challenge

In transforming the company from Telecom to Spark, the challenge was to re-invigorate the business from the foundations up. Spark was operating in an industry that was (and still is) going through massive disruption, and it wanted to communicate the burning platform for adaptation, and the pace and momentum needed to drive essential change.

At the time of the rebrand, Spark decided to take a closer look at its internal values. It made sense for the internal Spark team to align themselves closely with the sense of vigour and clarity the rebranding of Spark was projecting to its customers. Lasting and authentic change needed to come from the inside out, rather than just swapping out the more publicly visible elements of a company brand.

To go about this, Spark wanted to involve its people in writing the new Spark story and the values that would be the DNA ...