A few weeks back, I was playing word association with a friend of mine back home from work - word association for those blinking blindly, is a simple game where you ask someone to name anything - say apple. The other person is supposed to tell you the first thing that comes to his/her mind when the word is said. Then you take that word, and get what marketers call “Top of the Mind Recall” for that word, and so on.

Well the objective of this post is not to start a chain of word associations amongst readers, but to talk about how this term is not something new to the average consumer. Every day - day in and day out, you wake up, wear, use, throw, preserve, gift, and aspire to buy what is beautifully called “a brand” in marketing terms. Well I call it a beautiful term because it subliminally hides a lot of depth behind that innocuous looking word.

A brand according to my understanding, is much more than a bundle of utility, much more than what mom would go and purchase all of a sudden without looking for a choice, something that separates one product from a host of others in the market, when almost all of them offer the same benefit.

Right now on my mind, as I write this post, a picture of a brand haunts like a ghost…
It refuses to leave, and is always on my mind, when I`m at work, or when I unwind…

Well the Hutch dog has been all over the place - be it small cutouts with the mutt guarding small stores, or posters outside retail stores, or be it those huge towering hoardings at highway junctions. Hutch entered Mumbai, and yes they did certainly beleive in making it BIG.

To start of with for the average non Mumbaiite, Hutch has had a pan-India presence, except for Mumbai, where it was branded as Orange; why orange? - I still dont know! Someone once quipped in our Branding class that perhaps it goes well with the brand’s tagline - “The future is bright. The future is orange.” Well as this blogger says, the future for Mumbai has turned PINK now!

Mumbai’s most envied telecom brand has changed its colors - from orange to Pink… what intrigues is, however, WHY PINK?

Well as I happened to read some interesting facts on K’s blog about how Orange as a brand had to be returned to France Telecom, by Hutch; the change was inevitable, and the company needed to get its orange hues out.

Hutichison Essar’s Corporate Vice President Group Marketing, Mr. Naveen Chopra says

“We believe the time has come to refresh this brand and inculcate a new ‘Hutch spirit’ which will make us more vibrant and promising for all.”

Websites and marketing gurus all over the www have been giving their views of how effective this new color could be to the brand - would the customer be able to say Hutch, when his friend says the word ‘mobile’ or is the future Pink & Shocking for the brand? Time will tell…

(Part 1 of a series on importance of brand imagery)

Other sources:
http://sify.com/finance/fullstory.php?id=13981914