Tilted on its Axis

Any surprise then that the day the Rs 10-crore (industry ballpark) O&M campaign for UTI Bank got rolled out to announce a change of name?from UTI to Axis?AC Nielsen tabled the results of its survey of the country?s 50 Most Valued Brands, wherein UTI Bank?incidentally, the only brand from the UTI stable to figure in the list that featured brands from all sectors?made it to rank 41.

The stakes were obviously high enough for the brand custodians to justify the huge spend on the name change, when, as the punch line itself goes on the declare, ?Everything is the same, except the name!?

In other words, while it was a big change??after all, brand change is the biggest identity change for a brand,? in the words of Samit Sinha, managing partner, Alchemist Brand Consulting?the objective of this campaign was quite the reverse. To make this big change appear small in the perception of the bank?s existing and prospective customers, reassuring them that nothing in fact had changed.

And here came the twin analogy.

?We figured that people have a high emotional connect with twins,? explains Sumanto Chattopadhyay, group creative director, O&M, Mumbai, the creative brain behind the campaign. ?They think they are mysterious and charming. They also expect twins?whether identical or fraternal?to be exactly alike, which was the concept we wanted to convey to the customers of a financial services company, who can feel jittery at the smallest, cosmetic change.?

The agency also realised the need to make the message short and intense. ?Our brief indeed was to shout, shut and forget it,? says Chattopadhyay.

It was made clear to the agency that the bank did not want any lingering association with UTI, perhaps even wanted to eliminate that association in the long run, owning to both legal and perception issues dogging the UTI name. In any case, after January 2008, the license to use the UTI name would have expired for the new entity. So it had to drop the name in a year?s time. So the bank must have thought why not now?

Explaining all this, Hemant Kaul, president (retail banking), Axis Bank, says, ?We were keen to scotch rumours that there would be any disruption in our services to the old customers, as well as ensure that our new customer acquisitions sould not slacken. Ours is a high involvement service; so we had to be pre-emptive of any possible damage from the identity change,? he adds.

Hence the need to make it an intensely run, four-week, 360-degree campaign, the results of whose efficacy won?t be difficult to measure if the company were to later do a survey of its current customers, lapsed customers and new customers, says Sinha. But, there is time for that. As of now, everyone knows that UTI Bank is Axis and the twain cannot be confused.

Industry watchers claim that there aren?t many precedents of such re-branding exercises. In the financial service sector, the only parallel that can be drawn is that of Imperial Bank turning into the State Bank of India in 1955 but that was 52 years ago (in 1955) when media channels weren?t so fragmented and the bank had just 400 branches to communicate the message to. In today?s era of anytime, anywhere banking, the exercise becomes more complex, hence not all re-branding exercises are equally successful.

Consider the case of Rs 400-crore Heinz India acquiring the consumer products division of pharma major Glaxo in 1994. ?Over a decade and half later, Heinz?s sales have remained more or less stagnant and it has accomplished very little in terms of introducing new products from its global basket, mainly because the strong equity that Glaxo enjoyed prior to the acquisition is perhaps lost in the transition from Glaxo to Heinz,? says a marketing analyst based in Mumbai.

Another example could be Hindustan Unilever?s (then HLL?s) Brooke Bond brands. After casually ?dropping? the Brooke Bond label to a corner of its tea packs, the company felt compelled to bring it in prominence again in 2003 in an attempt to revive its (then) Rs 1,232-crore packed tea business in India. So it got O&M and Shombit Sengupta?s Shining Strategic Design to change its logo and packaging.

Other examples (one successful and the other not so successful) are of Imperial Tobacco Company that smartly eased itself into ITC, when the company was diversifying from a plateauing industry (tobacco) to a more happening hospitality sector, and of Mumbai-based logistics company, Air Freight, that became AFL only to discover to its chagrin that Air Freight commandeered more equity than AFL as one of the country?s oldest express and cargo companies.

The bottomline: all rebranding exercises do not work. An Axis by any other name may not have paid the same dividends, but an Air Freight was good enough to ferry its old customer base.