It's brand-building time for public sector banks

Rooftop gardens, techno-savvy board room, plasma TV screen at chairman's secretariat and sky-scraping, glass and steel headquarters marked the first round of makeover of the public sector banking sector.

The state-owned banks are now embarking on a big brand overhaul exercise. Leading the pack is Bank of Baroda (BoB).

With a catchline 'Fine banking with no fine print', BoB plans to take on its younger, niftier private sector peers. The cost of the brand overhaul is Rs 50 crore for the fiscal year "" five times the standard spend on this score.

This is big money considering the fact that aggregate television ad spends of public sector banks for January-June 2004 was Rs 2.05 crore. That number, by the way, marked a 324 per cent rise year-on-year basis.

The lion's share of it was by State Bank of India (Rs 1.58 crore).

In recent past, another public sector player "" Dena Bank "" named Bollywood actor Juhi Chawla its brand ambassador, taking off on private sector Bank of Rajasthan's contract with Hema Malini.

BoB will splash its new ads on both print and audio-visual media. Two advertising agencies, Percept and Interpublicity, are readying the new ad campaigns.

While State Bank of India is making many of its branches plush, BoB is all set to sport a new logo and unleash an expensive ad campaign.

"The ad will be a dig at the private sector banks which offer customers loans and other products along with documents loaded with fine print which nobody can understand. Through the new campaign we will try to capitalise on the fact that all our offerings are very transparent," said a BoB official.

The brand overhaul strategy follows a market research study, by ORG Marg, that revealed that the 97-year old brand's brand equity and brand recall were suffering.

BoB's new logo has been designed by Ray & Keshav, the agency responsible for the new Kotak Mahindra Bank logo and that of telecom service provider, Airtel.

The bank will have a vermilion hued 'B' with a rising sun in the left-hand corner as its new logo. The colour signifies the loyalty and the sun indicates the start of a new dawn.

The bank will have to change the name boards at all its 2,800 branches in 28 countries, leave alone office stationery, advertising material, greetings cards, visiting cards etc.

The earlier logo was a staid cluster of images of a blue coloured, palm, a manufacturing wheel and two ears of corn indicating banking for manufacturing and agriculture. The ORG Marg survey indicated that customer recall for the logo was far from favourable.

As part of the business process re-engineering at BoB, being supervised by Gartner, the bank is also reshaping the layout of its branches, turning them into sales outfits while the processing of documents will be at a centralised set up either in Mumbai, Hyderabad or Chennai.

About 80 per cent of branches is likely to focus on retail business while the remaining will focus on SME and corporate businesses.