New identity for Australian freight rail launched

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http://www.artc.com.au/Article/Detail.aspx?p=6&np=4&id=450

New identity for Australian freight rail launched

The company responsible for managing Australia's national rail freight network, ARTC, has unveiled its new brand today in line with a wider push to grow the industry and reflect rail's emerging status as the preferred mode of transport for much of Australia's freight needs.

Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) CEO John Fullerton said the new brand is representative of a wider transformation that ARTC, and the freight rail industry more generally, has been undergoing in Australia.

"We have a compelling product and we need to be more confident about championing rail and increasing its appeal to Australian businesses – so that we can become a more dominant component of transport supply chains more generally across the country.

"The new brand is about presenting ARTC as a reinvigorated company that will play an increasingly important role in the logistics solutions of our customers," Mr Fullerton said.

"This really was an exercise that started from scratch," ARTC Executive General Manager Corporate Affairs, Jane Lavender-Baker said.

"There was no previous depth or understanding behind the previous identity and no brand architecture to speak of, so we spent a lot of time understanding the core values of the business and developing the overall brand blueprint before we got into the fun stuff.

"Despite the cliché, ARTC was one of those businesses that you had to scratch the surface to find some real gems underneath, and as a result we discovered a company that really was quite visionary, enduring, genuine and had a 'can-do' attitude.

"As a result, we have really pushed the characteristics of boldness, simplicity and a degree of stark honesty to the new design that best represented ARTC's values and its goals," Ms Lavender-Baker said.

Mr Fullerton said ARTC has moved from what has effectively been a 'building phase' where the company had delivered around $6 billion of new infrastructure over the last nine years to a phase where it was now focused on leveraging the investment it had made into the network.

"A major component of this is to shift our business to one with a greater customer focus because this is pivotal to us achieving business growth," Mr Fullerton said.

"In order to grow, we need our customers, the industry and our employees to value, support and advocate for rail freight and its benefits – and not be shy about aggressively pursuing this.

"We are cognisant that this brand change has to be followed up by demonstrable change and action however," Mr Fullerton said.

"For this to be "real" change, we need to continue evolving as we have done over the last two years.

"That's our commitment, and we are especially wary this can't just been seen as a slick marketing exercise. That's not true to us as a business, our people or the wider rail and logistics industry as a sector," Mr Fullerton said.

The company parts with its old brand after 15 years – established when the company was first created as a Government Business Enterprise (GBE) after the Commonwealth and State Governments agreed in 1997 to the formation of a "one-stop-shop" for all operators seeking access to the National interstate rail network.

Sydney-based Moon Communications Group was engaged to develop the brand strategy, architecture and identity over

Last updated: 01 Dec 2014