Dhanlaxmi Bank: Brand new

Two years ago, 83-year-old Kerala-based Dhanlaxmi Bank decided to expand to the rest of India. For that, it needed an aggressive front-end workforce. The challenge was to bring the brand up to speed to connect with the rest of India, which would not relate to its tradition-laden banking history in Kerala. At the same time, the bank could not alienate its traditional customers either.

It roped in Ohio-based design consultancy Fitch which has in the past worked with the likes of Asian Paints, Vodafone and Nokia. The result: The bank changed its colour and name in January this year and launched its first redesigned signature branch in Mumbai in October. An all-India advertising campaign is expected to break sometime in February 2011. “We had to make sure that the core of the bank did not change; so there were a lot of restrictions. The name and the logo of Goddess Lakshmi could not be changed, though it could be spelled differently,” Sheran Mehra, Dhanlaxmi Bank’s marketing head, says. “The whole point was to make an impression in an already crowded market where many choose banks according to the advice of their parents or employee. That is when we went to Fitch.”

 

“We realised that tradition did matter to the brand. But that was it; everything else about it could be fresh, open and ready to demystify banking,” says Fitch Managing Director (South Asia) David Blair. Out went the traditional spelling of Dhanalakshmi. The easy-to-spell Dhanlaxmi Bank came in a contemporary font. The colour chosen for the logo and the decor at the branches was a deep purple, associated with wealth in India.

Photographs at the branches are not the obvious images and neither does the bank use a staid tone; there are instead lines such as ‘Tell us your story’ across the images on the walls. Cubicles have been done away with to make the space unhampered by furniture. Posters won’t clutter glass windows or any available space at these branches. Blair says: “Businesses need to stop adding mindless material to their real estate and stand back to think how they can communicate the brand, more so with banks which are difficult to represent visually.”

Dhanlaxmi Bank treaded cautiously during the change. Following the identity change in January, it communicated first to its audience in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. “We did not want to communicate on a national platform first because we wanted to reassure our existing customers where the brand is entrenched. We also wanted to highlight the branches in the new places,” says Mehra. The existing consumers, which included over 1,200 temple trusts, were wary of the bank changing its ethos. “After the downturn, people were wary of international financial institutions. We met the customers and told them we would not alienate them,” he adds.

The bank has opened 66 new branches in 2009-2010 to drive traffic to the branches. “While others are dissuading customers from turning up at the branches, we are coaxing them to visit us. If they don’t experience us they won’t convert,” says Mehra. That is why local area marketing such as promotional activities and meeting prospective customers have been stepped up. Mehra claims 50 per cent of the revenue is being brought in by the 66 new branches.