For seven years, YCC Company worked in Sverdlovsk Region under the Bee Line trademark on the basis of a license agreement with OAO Vimpelcom. The license agreement extended to mobile communications services of the D-AMPS standard. In late 2002 the company opened a GSM network that would operate in parallel with the D-AMPS network. The company decided that it needed a new trademark that would encompass all of the communications services that it was providing. For its part, OAO Vimpelcom also wanted to stop using the Bee Line trademark in the Ural region under license, since it intended to create its own network in the region. It was feared that the mutual decision of the two companies to “redistribute” their trademarks might nevertheless confuse subscribers. Furthermore, Vimpelcom’s stated plans in the local press were interpreted as if Vimpelcom intended to unilaterally "take away" the Bee Line trademark from the licensee, and this would supposedly negatively affect YCC’s business.

After studying the situation, the agency identified deeper problems having to do with the perception of the changes by consumers and potential clients. As long as the Bee Line trademark was being used, the target audiences saw the company as the leader of the local market (MegaFon Company entered the market later, and UralTel was a regional company). However, the forecast for growth of the mobile communications market in the region showed that by creating its own trademark the company might lose this leadership. This process would be inevitable because other companies working in the GSM standard were expected to make Yekaterinburg an arena of competitive struggle among themselves. MegaFon and UralTel, both working in Yekaterinburg, represent nationwide operators (MegaFon directly, and UralTel was acquired by Mobile TeleSystems and was preparing to transfer to this trademark in April 2004). The opening of Vimpelcom’s own network in the region was expected in late 2003. Regardless of their real marketing results, competition between the nationwide operators on the local market was supposed to put YCC, which had lost its Bee Line trademark, in the clear position of a “regional” or “local” company, which might seriously damage its reputation.

A "regional" company a priori has less resources and prospects for growth than a "nationwide" one, and this impression among consumers is especially dangerous for high-tech companies, since their services and capabilities must grow, and consumers expect this (new services, new rate configurations, etc.). A “regional” company a priori has a qualitatively different management system than a “national” one. Consumers are intuitively aware that large companies are managed according to functional models whereas “local” ones are managed according to the "people" principle, which means a different degree of reliability. Any competitive struggle waged by a "local" company against a national one in the eyes of consumers, as a rule, is doomed to failure. Furthermore, the metamorphosis of YCC might be perceived as a fall from a leadership position to that of an outsider. Thus, YCC had not only to create a new trademark to replace the Bee Line trademark, but also create a new marketing model and value base for communications that would minimize the risk of damage due to the danger of losing leadership.

With regard to the creation of the trademark, the task was strictly a matter of design. Creating it was a basic element of all the work, since in the absence of a new identifier all the other tasks could not have been fully accomplished. For this reason the agency developed a plan to create a trademark as the "core" of the overall project and organize events surrounding it aimed at high-level problem-solving. Thus, the strategy was based on using rebranding as the main driver of all the activities and the determinant of the task sequence.

Preliminarily the agency organized a press conference in Yekaterinburg after spelling out in detail to journalists the situation with regard to the company’s relationship with Vimpelcom, the procedure and anticipated time frame for ceasing to use the Bee Line trademark, the rebranding procedure, as well presenting the new marketing model and ideology of a regional company and materials proving that the name change would not negatively affect the company’s business or the capabilities available to clients. Thus, the agency stimulated interest in the new trademark, which was to emerge within two months. The agency also took advantage of Porter Novelli’s reputation as one of the world’s leading specialists in the area of corporate communications with the goal of showing that the rebranding would be carried out in accordance with international quality standards.

During the waiting period, the agency developed a communications concept called "changing the sign". The expression “changing the sign in itself means, according to a phraseological dictionary, "external changes that do not affect the essence". All the signs with the Bee Line logo were covered with placards with the company’s name and the text “sign change.” A number of media outlets, as was expected, used them as an illustration and translated this metaphor.

In order to come up with a name, the agency used a standard work cycle that included mainly technical components (research, linguistic studies, patent checks, focus groups). After completing the necessary procedures, the company selected "Motiv". The agency chose Yekaterinburg designer Alexander Mavrin, with whom it had cooperated previously, to create the logo and brand book.

The inauguration events were structured around the second press conference in Yekaterinburg, which repeated in its key substantive elements the initial press conference with the goal of strengthening the perception of the company’s new ideology. In addition, included in the materials of the press conference was information prepared by Porter Novelli International describing modern communication trends and branding in the worldwide telecommunications services sector. The main thesis of this analysis was that in countries where cellular penetration is quite high, the main values propagandized by companies is neither the high-tech nature of the services nor consumer advantage, but the values of interpersonal communication, stimulating subscribers to use their mobile phones more often. This is why cellular companies’ “third generation” trademarks do not contain references to categories including the roots "com", "mob",  "cell", "tele", "link", "line", "phonev"  etc.

The Orange brand, one of the top 5 most recognized brands in the world, is an example of this, as are other leading national brands in developed countries such as Idea, O2, Dialog, Amena, One2One, Peoples, Sunday, Itineris, Cingular and many others. The new trademark Yekaterinburg Cellular also fully conforms to this trend.

The agency actively used subscribers of the company as the core audience for the further spread of information. A special detailed letter was sent with every customer bill. The call center’s operation was organized, and a standard question and answer sheet was prepared for it. With regard to SMS, subscribers received a screensaver for their handsets with the new logo and brief explanation of it. The agency prepared a special edition of the subscriber newspaper "690" that featured not only detailed explanations from the company, but also fragments of research materials, feedback from VIP clients, materials from Porter Novelli International, a poster-calendar with the new logo as well as a significant special interview with Vimpelcom’s Director for Strategic Communications Mikhail Umarov, which he gave at the agency’s request. That the interview occurred proved convincingly that the "divorce" of the companies was civilized and made it possible to preserve a friendly relationship between them as part of intra-industry cooperation. The same interview was also featured in the information packet of the press conference.

High-quality analysis of the recognition and perception of the new name within three days after the inauguration showed that the name will easily catch on and be positively perceived by the public. The weekly indicator of new connections after the company’s renaming not only did not fall, but increased. The company became one of Russia’s top ten largest mobile communications operators, becoming the third largest “regional” operator (the first five places are held by national and interregional operators). During the year following the completion of the project, the subscriber base has tripled.

The company also leads in terms of subscriber loyalty (percentage of subscribers switching to other networks). Though, as was expected, by the beginning of 2004 in Sverdlovsk Region all three nationwide operators worked under the company’s own broadly known trademarks, the company preserved its position as the leader of the local market.

On the basis of the company’s new ideology of a “regional” company and personally oriented marketing model, the company has implemented several new projects for narrow target groups. For example, the company is the only one on its market to implement special services for the hearing impaired (a client group numbering about 5000 people) and services for the transfer of hieroglyphic information (a client group numbering about 3000 people), etc.

All of this confirmed that a "regional" company indeed has the opportunity to take a more flexible approach to satisfying the specific requirements of an extremely narrow group of clients. The company was also serious about implementing advanced CRM systems. In 2004 the company independently conducted repeat research on the perception of trademarks, which on the whole confirmed the conformity of the value content of the Motiv brand with the structure of the ideal trademark that was designed the year before. In 2005 the Motiv trademark received the first Brand of the Year prize in the regional brand category. For 2005 (data from C-News, April 2006) the company was in the top 20 Russian communications companies of all types, demonstrating the best organic growth indicator in the industry (more than 88%). Today it is the largest private "local" communications company in the country.