A Brand the World Can Believe In

A light under a bushel

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) delivers unparalleled IT services, business solutions and outsourcing. As a division of the mighty Tata Group—one of India’s largest industrial conglomerates and employer of choice—TCS attracts the best and brightest graduates from the country’s top schools. Nevertheless, too few businesses knew or believed that TCS delivers truly best-in-class IT services and solutions.

Despite the talent, infrastructure and technical acumen that make it one of the top IT services firms in the world, TCS struggled to tell its own story well. The company lacked a true understanding of its own strengths and weaknesses relative to competitors, and it featured inconsistent messaging without a clear or common purpose. In the words of a rival executive: “They have better people, better quality and better delivery, but they don’t know how to market themselves.”

TCS needed a credible global brand that could successfully differentiate its offerings and help it move up the value chain from IT outsourcing and implementation to business consulting.

Delivering certainty

To start, TCS needed to understand the source of skepticism in the corporate IT community. We surveyed IT decision makers around the world using EyeOpener™, Siegel+Gale’s proprietary tool for analyzing drivers of brand preference. Our research revealed CIOs’ burning desire for reliability in IT partners (since 50% of IT projects typically fail), and underlying doubts about the abilities of Indian companies to meet that threshold.

At the same time, our research affirmed that TCS genuinely offers the cure to IT buyers’ fears about consultants and outsourcers. Above all else, the defining feature of TCS is a record of successfully delivering on its business promises.

In response, we built the TCS brand strategy on a promise of certainty, and an authentic pledge to ensure certainty to a level that no other global firm can match. Our messaging strategy and supporting visual system evokes rigor, discipline and attention to detail—the qualities from which the best and most certain outcomes emerge.

In considering how to communicate the revitalized brand to the IT world, we also noted that TCS was underselling its services through a confusing proliferation of unrelated sub-brands. Along with streamlining the existing portfolio, we also provided a clear set of decision criteria to ensure that TCS’ brand architecture could embrace growth without diluting the brand.

A redesign of the TCS website―which at the time failed to convey TCS’s new visual optimism and energy and lacked information hierarchy—was also critical to communicate the refreshed brand to external audiences. We decided to create a new website by establishing a new design language that enabled TCS to communicate its values of leading change and excellence. After evaluating all architectural and technical considerations, we created an effective roadmap for a successful relaunch of TCS.com.

The rewards of credibility

TCS is thriving with a believable, differentiated positioning that works well across the globe, and easily incorporates salient messages tailored to each regional market. TCS sales representatives and account managers are able to understand and fulfill their clients’ needs while remaining in sync with the overarching TCS brand. The new TCS website clearly communicates its business objectives and new brand visual system to external audiences while also effectively energizing internal staff.

Before clarifying the TCS brand, the company employed just over 50,000 people and earned about $4 billion in annual revenue. Today, nearly 200,000 IT consultants work for TCS in 42 countries, earning annual revenue of more than $8.3 billion. TCS has a brand that is respected around the world and poised for ongoing success.