10 months, 100 clients, and last minute course corrections — TCS CMO shares all the work behind the software giant's new look

• TCS had plans to revamp its image before the pandemic and it wants to make it clear that its new tagline is not a rebranding — but an evolution.
• In an interview with Business Insider India, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Rajashree R explains how it took 10 months, talking to over 100 clients, and coordinating with 460,000 employees to bring the brand’s new image to life.
• The millennial makeover isn’t just for the IT services company’s clients, but a new playbook for its employees to invest in.

India’s largest software exporter, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), has gone through what could be called an ‘adulting’ moment. Having been around for more than half a century, the company has rebranded itself to showcase its bold aspirations for the future. From ‘experience certainty’ — coined in 2005 — the IT services behemoth’s tagline now reads, ‘building on belief’.

It took 10 months, talking to 100 clients, and coordinating with 460,000 employees to bring the brand’s new image to life. Even until the last minute, TCS was course-correcting to make sure they got the messaging ‘just right’, according to Rajashree R, the company’s chief marketing officer (CMO.

“We went through a lot of iterations, a lot of feedback — sometimes we were tweaking, sometimes we were making large level changes. I remember even last night they were correcting stuff,” she told Business Insider during a Twitter Live.


A millennial makeover with employees at the centre
TCS is one of the largest private sector employers in India. They already have more than 460,000 employees across the globe with many more waiting in line to join TCS’ growth story.

“Our employees are our biggest brand ambassadors,” said Rajashree. She explained that they are the people who communicate directly with customers, which is why it’s very important that they understand the brand better than any promo, ad campaign or social post can put across.

Even when discussing TCS’ new look, the company made it clear that it wanted to get millennials to come and share their opinion considering that the organisation’s average age is between 26 to 27 years old.

“This was not like a boardroom activity. We had youngsters who came and shared their views about TCS and what they felt about the organisation and what they wanted to talk about,” Rajashree told Business Insider. And the main aim behind that was to make sure that it was an all-inclusive process.

It’s not a rebranding — it’s an evolution
Despite the timing of it all, the decision to rebrand TCS was not something that was triggered by the pandemic but already in the works before COVID-19 reached the borders of India.

“Even before the pandemic struck, we wanted to refresh our positioning because we felt we wanted to have a branding messaging platform that is a reflection of who we are as an organisation today, which is very different from what we were a decade ago,” said Rajashree.

TCS wants to be clear about the fact that it’s not moving away from its promise of offering clients certainty but that it’s evolving to showcase how the brand goes hand-in-hand with its clients to work towards a shared purpose.

Simply put, TCS is still offering what it always did — just a little more now, because it can. Moreover, technology is at the centre of it. Across the industry, the pandemic has been a lesson in how company transformations going forward are going to be centred on technology.

For a company like TCS, it’s an opportunity to shine. “We're not becoming somebody else. We're just finding the right messaging statement to position TCS much more strongly,” said Rajashree, clarifying the thought process behind the company’s new tagline is growth.

The aim is to “provide wings” to TCS’ many business teams and help them position the brand better.

TCS has its fingers in almost every pie, from aviation to financial services to retail. This means that there are many stories to be told. “Even as a CMO, there are stories that I have not heard, there are stories that I don’t know,” Rajashree remarked candidly.

The rebranding of TCS, in part, is about having a platform to tell stories that have not been told yet. And the audience isn’t just TCS’ clients but also their employees, shareholders and partners, according to Rajashree.