An overwhelming majority of Cabcharge Pty Ltd shareholders voted on the 21st of November 2018 to rebrand the company as A2B Australia, reflecting the company's forward-looking vision.

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This change was confirmed to the market the following week, when the company updated its ASX trading ticker from CAB to A2B.

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‍Overview

‍As with any major rebrand, the decision to evolve from Cabcharge to A2B wasn’t taken lightly. It represented a significant step for an ASX 500 business, and, with that, was a critical moment in time to evaluate Cabcharge’s current brand positioning. A rebrand was a necessary but vital challenge - aligning people and activities to deliver on current and future ambitions.

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Since 1976, Cabcharge has been Australia’s leading provider of personal transport. This project needed to be handled with the utmost care, to honour and respect the brand’s heritage. From establishing the business case to senior management for the rebrand, to presenting the final design solution, Toast collaborated closely with the business’ senior leadership and key stakeholders throughout the process. To deliver meaningful brand transformations, collaboration, partnership and trust are paramount.

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‍Challenge

‍Cabcharge was a rich legacy brand that had played an active role in the Australian community for many decades. The brand had significant national presence and were behind ground-breaking technological developments in payment solutions and communications platforms.

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But herein was the first limitation of the existing Cabcharge brand. While personal transport was the core focus of the business, past and present, the business had long demonstrated a market-leading aptitude for so much more than ‘cabs’. Cabcharge was also supporting an ever-growing house of brands, including their payments sub-brand, also called Cabcharge - a large cause of confusion for many audiences. At a time of significant taxi industry reforms, the masterbrand was simply not equipped to defend its market share against new market entrants.

The rebrand had to pay homage to the heritage of the brand, while ensuring it had the flexibility to harness future areas of growth. It had to align a vast array of audiences, but most critically, create a unifying purpose that internal staff could rally behind. The brand had to be relevant to multiple audiences and pertinent to a range of business functions. A brand rich in meaning, and above all, one that everyone could be proud of.

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‍Approach

‍From the beginning of the project, we took the time to truly understand the business challenges and strategic opportunities to ensure a carefully crafted execution. Undertaking stakeholder interviews with the senior leadership team as well as independent research on relevant macro trends affecting the personal transport industry meant we lived and breathed the brand as if it were our own.

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The core tenet of our approach is partnership grounded in close collaboration. The Cabcharge project was a highly iterative process, with many key milestones along the way.

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One of the more impactful milestones was in the first few weeks of the project, when Toast was instrumental in developing and presenting a case for the CEO to rename the masterbrand. While there was a strong case to make this move, it was a bold move with significant implications, and gaining stakeholder trust and buy-in was a critical part of aligning the Cabcharge team with the branding project.

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Board approval was achieved and Toast began the extensive and exciting process to evolve the brands positioning to create future opportunities for the business. We held workshops with senior leadership and regularly checked in with critical stakeholders to transform strategic outputs into new and meaningful brand blueprints.

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This included stress-testing the brand’s positioning work by considering it and comparing it closely with business activities, and both present and future ambitions. Importantly, we ensured that the new brand positioning resonated with all key stakeholders at an emotional level - a brand that captured the spirit and the uniqueness of their business.

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The end result is a new brand identity that will set up the business for its most exciting chapter yet.