Most successful rebranding exercises take place during times of transition— after scaling rapidly or when entering new markets or integrating new entities following an acquisition. Your current brand tends to feel jaded or out of sync with new goals and shifting audience expectations.
When Deepinder Goyal, CEO of restaurant aggregator and food delivery platform Zomato, first mooted the idea of rebranding the company as Eternal in 2022, he had checked all the relevant boxes. His note to his employees explained the move in more specific terms: The corporation is in the process of evolving from managing a single, mostly independent business to managing a number of sizable businesses. Goyal also told his team after the Blinkit acquisition that he didn’t want the new team to feel like a “step child”. Thus, renaming the parent company and treating Zomato and Blinkit on an equal footing under the Eternal umbrella brand made a lot of sense. “Eternal, which means forever, puts into perspective the vision we have for ourselves henceforth — to build an organisation that is sustainable and serves a purpose beyond any of our lifetimes,” he had said.
And last week, when Goyal announced that its board of directors had approved a resolution to officially change the name of the parent company to Eternal Ltd, he also assured consumers on social media that brand Zomato wasn’t going anywhere.
Aside from the food delivery platform, Zomato also owns quick commerce brand Blinkit, lifestyle app District that allows consumers to book tickets for movies and events, and Hyperpure, which is its end-to-end restaurant supply chain solution. All four businesses will retain their individual brand identities and the rebrand is solely for the corporate parent company.
Zomato, which went public in 2021, has been recording strong revenue growth across its brands with a 64% year-on-year increase posted in the October-December 2024 quarter to reach `5,405 crore. Its latest move ties in well with its vision to be more than a food delivery app.
According to Sandeep Goyal, chairman at Rediffusion, reconfiguring brand architecture is the norm these days. “Alphabet and Meta have done it too, among others. Eternal is following the same format. The corporate brand will be distinct from the service brands – Zomato, Blinkit and District. This gives the promoters a lot more flexibility in terms of raising capital through mergers, demergers and other such structures. The consumer remains unaffected,” he says.
To be sure, the move is not unlike Google’s rebranding to Alphabet in 2015, which enabled the company to rationalise its core operations while also growing its bouquet of businesses from Google and YouTube to Fitbit and Double Click.
Now that Zomato too has varied businesses, experts believe the time is right for rebranding. Its latest move indicates that the company is signalling bigger ambitions, and setting the stage for expansion beyond food delivery and quick commerce, remarks Lloyd Mathias, strategist and independent director.
The rebrand lays the groundwork for Zomato to evolve into a full-fledged holding company that anchors multiple businesses. “This will allow it to operate more efficiently and grant the flexibility to diversify, consolidate and even hive off businesses, in tune with market requirements,” explains Mathias.
Impact of rebranding
While the newly named Eternal’s Goyal has emphasised that the rebranding will have no impact on the consumer’s experience, there could be some bearing on each of the businesses, points out Ajimon Francis, MD of Brand Finance India. The positives are that the brands will have the freedom to build themselves in their own respective spaces and sectors.
Further, any bad press about a specific brand will have no rub-off effect on either the parent or sister brands. “This basically means that the brands are ring-fenced from potential damage. The parent company will take on the cost burden and the hit for any poor performance from new products or services,” explains Francis.
On the flip side though, Francis says that higher spends will be needed to build individual brands, even if there are synergies in the back-end.
The main task for the company’s corporate communications team will now be to manage the company rebranding for the trading community, states Naresh Gupta, founder and managing partner, Bang In The Middle. Moreover, the new choice of name Eternal neither represents its values, its business nor its tech prowess. “You always run the risk of a few people getting confused or underwhelmed. This is the corporate face and at some stage the company will have to launch a campaign to integrate the brands and build a unified appeal,” says Gupta.
Given that the company only went public a few years ago, Zomato’s rebranding is a sound move, sums up N Chandramouli, CEO of brand intelligence firm TRA Research. He expects no major challenges from the stock market or among investors. In stark contrast, he adds that the fallout would have been very different if one of the consumer-facing brands like Zomato or Blinkit were to undergo a complete overhaul.