OK Tata, but where's the eureka?

Great brands, it is said, belong in the canvas of life, not the quadrangle of the marketplace, and that definitely applies to the Tata brand. Therefore, when I picked up Morgan Witzel’s book Tata The Evolution of a Corporate Brand, I expected to get a lot of "eureka" moments about why and how the Tata brand had managed to remain timeless, ageless, and stellar through all the changes from the days of Lord Curzon and Jamsetji, to post-liberalisation India and Ratan Tata.

I also expected to learn a lot from the comparisons such a book would make between the journey of the Tata brand and other iconic brands of the same era as well as new challenger brands that came along. I looked forward to an insightful and intertwined account of the changes in the canvas of life in India and how the Tata brand adapted to it, interacted with it. Finally, I expected my heart and soul to be touched and awed the way it was when I saw Zafar Hai’s film on the Tatas; and I expected my thinking about corporate branding to be greatly enhanced because of the richness of the case study.

I must confess to being disappointed. To be fair, the book offers a very well-researched business history of the Tata group and a pretty good description of its DNA, illustrated with several examples. It will be of great value to foreign readers, who know the Tatas by their acquisitions but not by their heritage and values. To most of us who are familiar with Indian business, however, much of this is known and often written about. The book also competently chronicles the challenges faced by the corporate brand over the years, how they were dealt with, and describes in detail the various internal and external brand-building activities of the group and individual companies over the years. Brand theory discussions are, however, fairly basic, like stating that individual company brands do add to the corporate brand perception. What I missed most in the book was depth. The text has inviting bold statements like "Tata’s reputation for incorruptibility has made the group enemies too... politicians who ask for bribes are refused and tend not to regard the Tatas with much favour" and "those companies that use the Tata corporate brand now share a common identity even while maintaining their uniqueness". But the discussion that follows is left at surface elaboration.

Full report here Sify