Abstract

This is a series of three caselets that would help highlight the issues involved in rebranding, especially a corporate rebranding exercise. The first caselet is about the rebranding of India’s leading fast moving consumer goods company Hinsustan Lever Ltd. (HLL) to Hindustan Unilever Ltd. (HUL) in an effort to benefit from the global brand positioning of its parent Unilever Plc. without compromising on its local heritage. The second caselet is about the rebranding of one of India’s top private sector banks, UTI Bank, to Axis Bank. Rather than paying royalty for the use of the brand name ‘UTI’ that was also used by some unrelated entities, the company decided to go for a brand name that was culture neutral and had a global appeal. The third caselet is about the rebranding of the popular Indian telecom brand ‘Hutch’ to ‘Vodafone’ after the world’s leading telecom company by revenue Vodafone Plc. (Vodafone) acquired a controlling stake in one of the top telecom companies in India Hutchison Essar Ltd. While HUL’s marketing commu-nication campaign was comparatively low-key with the company just showing the name and logo of HLL morphing into the new name and logo after each product ad, Axis Bank and Vodafone launched two of the most memorable and high-decibel campaigns to communicate their respective name changes. Axis Bank’s campaign sought to reassure the bank’s customers that nothing had really changed in the bank except its name, while Vodafone campaigns tried to leverage on some of the most popular earlier ads of Hutch to introduce the relatively unknown Vodafone brand (in India).

Learning Objectives

The case is structured to achieve the following Learning Objectives:

• Understand the issues and challenges in rebranding a well established brand, especially in the banking sector in India
• Understand the rationale behind the marketing communication campaign and how the campaign was executed by the ad agency
• Understand the issues that could lead to the decision of a company to rebrand
• and Understand how a rebranding exercise for a company in a particular industry differ from that in another industry.

Keywords

Branding, Rebranding, Integrated marketing, Marketing Communication, Customer acquisition, 360-degree media, Brand equity, Media, Strategy, Banking, Telecom, FMCG, Unilever, Vodafone, Hutch, UTI Bank, Axis Bank, Ogilvy & Mather