Trust, reliability and service to the community are some of the values associated with the name Tata, says Morgen Witzel, an honorary senior fellow at the University of Exeter Business School and a senior consultant with the Winthrop Group of business historians. Yet, internationally, awareness of the Tata brand remains patchy, Witzel, author of Tata - The Evolution of a Corporate Brand, told DNA in an interview. Excerpts:
What does Tata as a brand stand for?
There are three key values that seem to emerge from conversations I have had with people. One is the idea of trust. If you ask anyone within the Tata group what they think is the key element of the Tata brand, they will all say trust. The second notion is reliability — if we promise something, we will do it; if we promise something and it doesn’t really work out then we will do it again till we get it right. I talked to somebody who bought one of the first Nanos. He said one of the reasons he bought it was that he knew it was going to be reliable. The third, as we just discussed, is the service to the community.
Originally, service to India, but of course now Tata is a world wide corporation and they practise the same value of service wherever they go. Tata Consultancy Services in America, for example — the work they did when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. TCS Engineers played a vital role providing software to enable
emergency services for free.
Much of the Tatas’ philanthropy is essentially in continuance of the past. Take Jamshedpur, built almost 100 years back. They never ventured into building a city again. Or take the big institutions like Indian Institute of Science or Tata Institute of Social Sciences. These were also built a long time back. Has the Tata group’s social obligation come down over the years?
They are actually doing something big in terms of trying to make a difference, whether it is running programmes teaching people how to read, or rebuilding communities in South India after the Tsunami or doing environmental programmes, or helping farmers know what is the right time to sow their crops, which fertilisers are the best to use, etc.
There is such vast range of programmes. There hasn’t been another Jamshedpur, but maybe the time for Jamshedpurs is past, maybe that was something that was right in the 19th century and isn’t necessarily now.
There is no doubt that the commitment is still there. What I was basically asking is —- has the size of things they used to do for the society come down?
May be. But I won’t agree with it. There is a pretty big cancer hospital they are building in Calcutta. Also, the amount of effort that they brought in Kerala for the tsunami, that was huge in terms of investment.
“JRD himself compounded the problem by failing to name a successor until late in the day, which in turn gave rise to factionalism among senior managers and general uncertainity as to where the group is going,” you have written in the book. Isn’t Ratan Tata making the same mistake now?
I wouldn’t comment on that because that’s none of my business. Also because we can look back with hindsight and say that JRD Tata should have named a successor soon. We only know that with historical hindsight. In 15 or 20 years we will know whether Ratan Tata made the right decision, we don’t know now.
When Ratan Tata took over as the chairman of Tata Sons nearly two decades back, what challenges did he face with the Tata brand?
Ratan Tata felt there were two things. First, the brand itself did not have a firm identity. As he said “We had a reputation, we didn’t have brand.” And I think that is true because there was this great wealth of legacy that Tata had from the past and a huge amount of goodwill from everyone towards the group.
But there was not a consistent and coherent image across the group. If you look at the brand marks that were used at that point of time, every company had its own. There was a confusion and inconsistency of message and image which he felt had to be rectified. The second was to go international. He was convinced that Tata’s future in part lay outside India. And that meant translating the values of the Tata brand into the international markets. The first problem is pretty much solved. The second is still on going and will be ongoing for some time.
A lot of Tata companies do not use the Tata brand. What are the reasons for the same?
Some of the reasons are historical. Take the case of Taj. It has such strong brand of its own, it was felt that it would be wrong to superimpose the Tata brand on top of it. So if you look at Taj, it says in quite small that it is a Tata group company. But it is still pretty much the Taj brand.
Among the overseas brands like Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley Tea in the UK or the Eight O’Clock Coffee in the US, to have these very strong and existing consumer brands rebranded as Tata could cause confusion in the minds of the consumer. But look at Corus Steel. It is now Tata Steel Europe. It’s a decision which is taken very much on a case-to-case basis. It is not like General Electric where everything is called GE this and GE that.
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