New Tata Identity Launch By Year-End

Wally Olins, presently involved in evolving a uniform group identity for the Tatas, will be making its final presentation in early June and the new Tata identity will be launched by the year-end.

The Tata name enjoys the highest corporate brand recall of 95 per cent in the country, a Marg survey conducted as a part of the exercise has revealed. In the course of its interactions with the Tata employees, investors, company managements, vendors, competitors, associates, public and bureaucrats, Wally Olins said the Tata employees shared a 'great sense of pride' at being a part of the Tata fold. However, there persisted a perception that the group was slow, bureaucratic, not the best pay masters and lacked an efficient communication system.

 

The Tatas also need to bring in focus all the group activities, Wally Olins felt. "The evolution of a corporate identity involves four broad steps, depending on the size of the group,'' says S V Sista, chairman, Sista Saatchi & Saatchi, and Wally Olins associate in India.

The process involves a precise brief from the group chairman, following which a proposal will be formulated. Subsequently, a whole series of in-depth interviews are conducted to identify the goals, strengths, weaknesses, vision and philosophy of the group. Wally Olins feels that corporate identities should be evaluated on task-based criterion in which purely visual questions are subsumed into wider parameters.

"This process takes 3-6 months," Sista said. The second step is the development of the central idea, the strategy to project the group, the development of the visual identity and manifestation, which takes about three months.

The third phase is the actual implementation process which is done through the help of both internal as well as external communication, and the final phase involves the post launch monitoring of the process.

The new logo design will also incorporate the group's vision for the future, Sista said. While Wally Olins is devising the corporate identity for the country's largest corporate group, McKinsey is presently looking at a possible restructuring of the group activities. "The two activities go hand-in-hand and are dovetailed and so far both our thinking on various issues have been similar," Sista said.

What is more challenging in the evolution of a corporate identity for the Tata group is the three categories of Tata companies - the ones that have the direct Tata brand incorporated in the name, the ones that call themselves Tata Enterprises, and those which do not use the name at all," Sista added.

"Hence the usages of the final logo may not be uniform," he pointed out.