Optus: Repositioning After a Crisis Is the Hardest Move of All

This is episode four of Making Moves, a weekly mini-podcast where Ne-Lo co-founders Ross Hastings and Kieran Antill pick a company making an interesting strategic move and interrogate it. Unscripted, unedited, under 15 minutes. The Optus episode was recorded on 15 May 2026.

This week: Optus.

Watch the episode here

What happened

In September 2022, Optus suffered one of the largest data breaches in Australian corporate history. The personal details of close to 10 million customers were exposed. Names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, passport numbers, and licence numbers.

The response was slow, the communication was poor, and the reputational damage was significant. The CEO resigned. The brand became a byword for exactly the thing a telco should never be: untrustworthy with your data.

The repositioning challenge that followed was not a standard one. Optus did not need to find a new market or articulate a new value proposition. It needed to rebuild something more fundamental: the basic belief that it could be trusted.

The difference between a crisis response and a repositioning

Most of what Optus did in the immediate aftermath was crisis management, not repositioning. New leadership, apologies, compensation offers, regulatory engagement. These were necessary but they were not strategic. They were the minimum required to stop the bleeding.

Repositioning starts when the crisis is stabilised and the business has to make a choice about what it wants to stand for going forward. That is the harder question. It is easy to say trust. Every telco says trust. The question is what you actually change to earn it, and how you make those changes visible to the people who stopped believing you.

The challenger brand opportunity

There is a counterintuitive opportunity in Optus's situation. A brand that has been publicly humiliated and has visibly changed as a result can actually build more trust than one that has never been tested.

The companies that come back strongest from reputational crises are the ones that treat the crisis as a forcing function. They do not just communicate differently. They operate differently. And because the public knows what happened, any visible change carries more weight than a generic brand promise from a competitor who has never been tested.

The risk is that Optus has treated this as a communication problem rather than an operational one. If the infrastructure, the data handling, and the internal culture have not genuinely changed, then the repositioning is a costume. And in a category where the next breach could happen at any time, that is a dangerous position to be in.

What the market actually remembers

Australians have a long memory for corporate failure but a reasonable capacity for forgiveness when change is demonstrable. The Optus breach is still present in public consciousness, but it is not necessarily the first thing every customer thinks about every day.

The window for repositioning is real. But it requires sustained operational change, not a campaign. A new brand platform launched over the breach without substantive change underneath it would likely accelerate distrust rather than rebuild it.

What to watch

The test for Optus is not the advertising. It is the next incident. How a company responds to its second crisis tells you far more about whether the repositioning was real than anything it says in the years between. Has the infrastructure improved? Has the culture of accountability changed? Is the leadership genuinely different in how it approaches risk?

If the answers to those questions are yes, the repositioning has a foundation. If not, the brand is one incident away from a much harder conversation.

Making Moves is a weekly mini-podcast from Ne-Lo, Australia's repositioning consultancy. New episodes every Friday.