Earlier this year Tom Alexander was enjoying his retirement having sold his stake in Virgin Mobile that he had helped to build working with Richard Branson as its chief executive. 

When he was invited to take over Orange mobile, despite sitting very comfortably with £20 million in the bank,being his share of the flotation of Virgin mobile, the temptation to transform Orange into a strong, dynamic much loved brand was to appealing to refuse, he certainly did not need the money.

Orange certainly is in need of  fresh impetus,  since Hans Snook launched the mobile network with the futures bright the futures Orange marketing campaign nearly 14 years ago and despite having 17 million customers, recently Orange appears to have lost its vigour and having its customer care centres based in India is not helping with customer retention.

There is similarity in style between Tom Alexander and Richard Branson, most importantly they both recogniser the power of having the customer love doing business with your company and wanting your staff to love working for their company and enjoy coming to work.

The new strategy for the business includes shedding hundreds of jobs after the business has been streamlined, strengthening its retail prescence on the high street with larger stores that will be exciting and vibrant to visit and investing strongly in the networks wi-fi coverage.  Some of their competitors, such as T-Mobile, have seen the need and the desire for the UK mobile phone user to have access to the internet with their laptops at 3G speed using their mobile phone network and they are definitely ahead of Orange at this time, there is for example the much awaited T-Mobile mda compact 1V about to hit the high street and the internet, with T-Mobiles excellent wi-fi coverage and great value added services such as web n walk these products and services are in great demand and they are giving the networks good high spending customers. The present Orange TV advertising campaign is concentrating on launching a new range of pay as you go tarriffs, why spend so much money to attract low spending customers? this surely highlights the direction that Orange are heading in at present. It will be very interesting to see the first Tom Alexander inspired campaign which should indicate its/the direction that he wants to take the network.

The level of customer services that Tom Alexander sees as key to his strategy will see a commitment to having their call centres based in the UK, if they want to challenge T-Mobile and Vodafone  in the race for good high spending users,this will be imperative.

�