Because this blog’s central focus is on brand building for ‘organization brands’, every time a significant corporate brand undergoes a facelift, I am tempted to add my two bits.
The Bharti Group being the latest one to go in for a new garb.
Frankly, more often than not I have felt that the visual identity changes tend to be taken up without any real change on the ground. In fact, one gets the sense that it is often to create a sense of activity in the absence of any real change on the ground.
However, in the case of Bharti, clearly the organization had transformed way beyond what its earlier identity reminded stakeholders of. There was a clearly a case of underlining that change and getting all the diversified forays of the group underlined in public memory. Having built a hugely successful core business in telephony, the group has also attracted the likes of Wal Mart and Axa to partner with it.
The new logo makes no attempt to maintain continuity with the past, indicative if the trajectory the group’s growth has followed. It is a striking new font in a color that one doesn’t see very often and the subtle idea in the perpendicular arrow-heads is well integrated into the unit.
Having said that, one also wonders whether the group missed out on an opportunity to make the idea work a little harder.
Fundamentally, the new identity, with all its attempts at taking the high ground, fails to capture the uniqueness of the Bharti personality. Part of the reason being the lack of idiosyncrasy in the Bharti group itself. They try very hard to portray a good, responsible big boy image and model themselves on the Sri Rama Archetype much like TATA or Infosys does.
Even the advertising around the new idea is as motherhood as one can get with the core message of ‘small steps resulting in something big’ and using metaphors like Gandhi etc. is nothing but a lazy attempt at creativity, with neither much upside nor much downside (when Apple did 'the crazy ones' more than a decade ago it was an idea and they could pull it off, but subsequently many have tried to ride on it without it really sticking to them). The full page ad Bharti did about a week back, could have belonged to a dozen other success stories of the last decade.
The TV commercial looks more like an a/v one would do for an internal sales meet to kick it off on a high.
Instead a closer to reality story probably would have worked much better.
There is a certain endearing humility to Mr. Sunil Mittal, which is a quality the group may do well to capture. Also, it has more Indian-ness than an Infy or a TATA, reflected in its North Indian roots and its ‘band of brothers’ management structure. In a way this makes the group more earthy, accessible and charming. They seem to be in denial of their rough edges and in the process miss out on the spunk.
It is a Dhoni compared to the Dravid/Kumbles, that it tries to walk in the footsteps of.
This cultural uniqueness of this group, along with its stellar business success could have given the communication that edge that it currently sorely lacks.
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