Even in today’s fast-changing, tech driven world, we have several brands that are over a hundred years old in our midst. Often, we may not even realise they are that old. Brands age just like we do. Some manage to stay up-to-date and relevant to today’s consumers, while many others fade away or disappear from our lives.
Usually, such ageing brands are from the automobile industry, wines and spirits, fine writing instruments, and other such luxury categories which, because of their dependence on the heritage aspect of their brands, face a bigger problem in dealing with it. I have written before on my blog about brands ageing well without growing too old.
However, ageing is not the only problem they face. Often it is that the market environment has changed, in that consumers’ tastes and preferences have changed. At other times, technology could have disrupted the entire industry, as we have seen in the past couple of decades. Or new entrants have intensified the competition for a share of the same market, and older brands have become part of the scenery. There could be several reasons for older and established brands not being the best or the most preferred anymore, and quite likely a combination of many of these reasons.
The product categories and brands that I wrote about earlier in the context of ageing, were all product brands. What happens when it’s a service brand? Do the same reasons or rules apply? For sure, there are several banks that are over a hundred years old and many of them do stress their history and heritage. They too face intense competition – though in India, banks are still a sellers’ market, as I have written before. They too face technology disruption though perhaps not in the same way, as in the basic product or service doesn’t change; it is the delivery of the service that is transformed by technology. They can adopt technology at scale and transform their business efficiency. Unlike a car, or a writing instrument where the basic product itself is transformed. And service industries too are impacted by new players and tougher competition, so they are required to innovate to stay ahead. Overall, though, it would be fair to say that service brands have it slightly easier when it comes to ageing and staying relevant to today’s customer.
In the luxury hotel industry, ageing well and staying relevant to the customer aren’t quite so simple. For one thing, there is the baggage of history and heritage. Secondly, unlike airlines where every airline flies the same or similar type of aircraft, hotels are very much individual and distinctive products in themselves. Thank goodness for this, since nobody would want to stay in a hotel that is a clone of another. The luxury accommodation, the interior design and the amenities matter as much as the service. Luxury hotels face a tough challenge on two counts:
- Being distinctive and superior to competitors in the eyes of the traveller
- Being uniform across properties and locations, so as to suggest the same brand
And while these might seem contradictory to each other, the resolution lies in the way the brand is created and built.
I have been thinking about the Taj Hotels brand, for instance. I had put down my thoughts on brand strategy and campaign ideas 15 years ago, when I returned from Delhi to be with my aged parents in Goa. Unfortunately, they were lost to termites, so I am having to recreate these from memory. I remember wondering even then, why IHCL was so intent on launching new brands of hotels such as Vivanta, Gateway, etc., when the focus ought to be on reviving the Taj Hotels brand first. It is the core and mainstay of IHCL and needs to be strengthened in the face of growing international competition. Besides, with the market for travel – both business and leisure – growing rapidly on the domestic and international front, Taj Hotels ought to be carving a niche for itself and growing its share of the enlarging pie.
Taj Hotels has been increasing its footprint in India to become the largest hotel chain in the country, with a few international properties as well. However, I think it has become part of the scenery, with so many new and international hotel brands operating in India now. Besides, Taj Hotels hasn’t communicated regularly enough with its target audience, so it’s quite likely that it isn’t even top of mind when it comes to hotel options. And when it does advertise even tactically, for a restaurant or food festival, the kind of advertising that I saw in the Navhind Times, Goa, is the last thing Taj needs. Why would Goans in Goa want to attend a festival of Goan Saraswat cuisine, even if hosted and conducted by a well-known chef, is not something that folks at the Taj or their advertising agency seem to have thought about. Then, having guessed my reaction to the advert, they released yet another advert for a Sri Lankan food festival at a restaurant called C2C at their Cidade de Goa property, which is now a Taj Hotel! Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of this advert, though I did write about it in a recent post on LinkedIn, because I suspect unprofessional PR agency idiot bosses are behind both adverts.
Taj Hotels shot to the news when the terrorist attacks of 26/11 took place in 2008, but for the wrong reasons, of course. And I remember thinking that Taj Hotels ought to film the entire reconstruction and renovation effort, to document the rebuilding of the Taj and also to share as a short documentary with the public. Later, I heard that the response of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel Mumbai team to the attack had become a Harvard Business School Case Study, which I happened to see on LinkedIn.
To my mind, the incident inflicted terrible physical damage on top of an image-related one, because Taj Hotels was already tending to fade away a little, what with Marriott and Four Seasons hogging the limelight in India. The last piece of brand advertising that I remember seeing for Taj Hotels was way back in 2000 or so, with the “She is the Taj” campaign, that was created by Rediffusion. It personified the Taj brand through its women employees, in a way similar to Singapore Airlines’ “Singapore Girl You’re a Great Way to Fly” campaign, for those of us old enough to have seen it and remember it. Unlike the Singapore Airlines campaign, though, which was mostly visual, this particular Taj campaign had headlines that tried to elaborate on what they meant by “She is the Taj”. The visuals were images of Taj women employees going about their daily work, but shot with the intention of suggesting busy and on her toes, as they had a slight motion blur, if I can call it that. All very spot on and tastefully executed, but I thought the way the adverts read, it was more a Taj Hotels brandprint (current and former Ogilvy employees will know what I am talking about) than an advertising campaign. One specific advert which said “… she is ambassador… she is the Taj” captured the core essence of the Taj brand, I remember thinking at the time. The campaign went to the brand’s core as a brandprint ought to and belonged more to brand strategy than an advertising idea. It didn’t engage and persuade, which advertising is meant to do.
If that was around 20 years ago, today’s world of business and travel is so much larger, more globalized and more interconnected than we have ever known it to be. In such a context, and especially with Covid-19 behind us, it makes sense for Taj Hotels to return to its role as cultural ambassador and bridge between India and the rest of the world. Fifteen years ago, when I was putting down these thoughts and ideas for Taj Hotels, I also happened to read a book on Bombay by Sharada Dwivedi and Rahul Mehrotra that belongs to my aged father in Goa. Titled Bombay: The Cities Within, it tells us about how the city grew and developed to what it is in recent times. It begins with what we know as the beginning of the history of Bombay: the Portuguese handing over Bombay to King Charles II of England, as dowry when he married Catherine of Braganza. I discovered while reading it, that Bombay was initially a city dominated by fisherfolk called Kolis, which over time grew to be a cosmopolitan city, attracting people from diverse cultures and communities, whether it was Gujaratis, Sindhis, Maharashtrians from outside Bombay, South-Indians as well as people of different religious faiths, from Hindus and Parsis to Christians and Muslims. But because of their occupations and the way Bombay was developing, they lived in separate localities. They write:
“Bombay’s segregated enclaves continued to grow through the decades of the late 1800s in the manner they had been established in the early founding years of the town. These enclaves became increasingly overcrowded as more and more people came to Bombay for jobs created by new building projects, the expansion of trade and industry, the continuous growth of the cotton, spinning and weaving industry and the heightened activity in the docks.”
The book does mention Taj Hotel many times, as it does Watson Hotel and The Greens, as places in Bombay where foreigners, especially the British would meet and interact among themselves as well as with Indians. The authors also write that the iconic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel building itself has an Indo-Saracenic architecture and had several architects and designers contribute to it, though it was finally completed by a British architect, WA Chambers, who Jamsetji Tata appointed, when one of the lead architects passed away. I remember thinking then that this new Taj Mahal Palace Hotel could well have been a perfectly neutral and common meeting place for foreigners, tourists and so many diverse local Indian communities to meet and mingle, a rarity I would imagine in Bombay of those days. The authors write:
“… the most important new hotel to be built was the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. The expansion of the city in the 1890s had led to the construction of more hotels such as the Apollo on Colaba Causeway, but most of these were open only to Europeans. It was perhaps to counter the racial prejudice of the times that Jamsetji Tata took the decision to build the Taj, where Indians of all castes and creeds could freely socialise amongst themselves and with Europeans on neutral ground.”
I thought that since the Taj Mahal Hotel was designed as an Indo-Saracenic structure, the architects and designers who worked on it were both Indian and British, it could have been a fine meeting place for people from all cultures and communities. Besides, in the 1930s, when all of South Bombay was going Art Deco in architecture and design terms, the Taj Mahal Hotel too had its interiors especially of the Grand Ballroom renovated to reflect the city’s new and international design sensibilities. The Taj has truly been a trendsetter in so many ways, that it brings us back to the Taj as cultural ambassador concept.
I think that the Taj must continue this tradition, even as times change. The world will always need people of all cultures and communities to meet and exchange ideas. The world will always need fine addresses to stay at while travelling on business and leisure, as well excellent meeting places for discussions. In my blog posts on airlines such as British Airways and Lufthansa as well as Air Vistara, I had written that airlines – especially flag carriers – are image builders for their countries. In this context, Taj Hotels shares a natural affiliation with both the airlines now in the Tata Group, Air India and Air Vistara.
And while Taj faces intense competition from several Indian as well as international hotel brands, I think the problem is compounded when IHCL (Indian Hotels Company Limited, a Tata Company) itself goes on a new brand launching spree. Instead, I recommend that the Taj Hotels brand be strengthened and consolidated through stronger brand-building strategies and communications, as well as sharper marketing efforts targeted at the relevant audiences, corporate travel, for example. I have also recommended that Taj allow business and first-class travellers on Air India and Air Vistara to redeem their rewards points at the Taj and for Taj guests to similarly redeem their guest rewards points on the airlines. You can read my thoughts on a new brand strategy and communication ideas for Taj Hotels by clicking the link below.
Reviving the Taj Hotels brand for the 21st century
If targeting new segments of travellers is the issue, I recommend exploring sub-brands of Taj Hotels, that offer the same exemplary Taj experience in different ways to different kinds of travellers. I think this would be more effective than launching new hotel brands. The only brand that is distinct from Taj within IHCL because it has a completely different product offering is Ginger Hotels. However, from what little I have seen of Ginger on their website, there is plenty of improvement required to make it a worthy sister brand from IHCL. I don’t think Taj Hotels ought to be going into the homestay business as they seem to have done with Ama Stays and Trails (awful branding as well!). I have written about the ill-effects of excessive homestay tourism ala Airbnb in a separate blog post earlier. However, there is a new space at least in India that IHCL can consider for launching a new brand: luxury serviced apartments for longer stays in a limited fashion in select cities.
In repositioning Taj Hotels as a place for world travellers to meet, I have simply returned the Taj brand to where it belongs. In a new context and time, of course. Like any luxury or heritage brand, Taj Hotels too has its roots in the city of its origin and no matter how large it grows, or how far and wide the brand spreads across the world, Bombay or Mumbai will continue to be its source of inspiration and light. And like every good luxury brand, Taj Hotels ought to stay focused on exclusivity and brand differentiation, attention to detail and unobtrusive service. Here’s hoping the Taj Hotels brand stays contemporary, relevant and international for all times.
The featured image at the start of this post of Taj Mahal Hotel Mumbai is by Joe Ravi on Wikimedia Commons, CC by SA 3.0
Postscript: I must tell the reader that the book, Bombay: The Cities Within that I happened to read 15 years ago at my aged parents’ place in Goa before putting down my thoughts and ideas for Taj Hotels then, has been tampered with by unprofessional PR agency idiot bosses, I suspect. Just like they have meddled with so many of my books while they were in storage at the packers and movers’ warehouse in Chennai when I was coming back home to my parents here, and the way they have interfered with my aged father’s books as well, including Mahatma Gandhi’s Moral and Political Writings that I have written about on my blog and Kipling’s book which belonged to my grandfather.
When I read this book on Bombay, the authors had written much more about the Taj’s Indo-Saracenic architecture which is missing now. In fact, the book had much more text to read than now when it seems to have more image plates. They had also never written that Jamsetji Tata built the Taj in order to counter any racial prejudice; this is mischief that has come from guessing what I had put down in my thoughts and ideas for Taj Hotels, where I had said that the brand ought to be a place where people of all cultures and communities can meet and mingle, irrespective of caste and creed, since the book had enough about how different communities lived separately in their own localities in Bombay. I doubt the authors wrote about Bombay’s “segregated enclaves”, in the sense in which segregation was practiced in India against lower castes, nor was it racial segregation as was prevalent in the US.
The bios of the authors and a lady who helped with the image research and the design – who was also an editor of Taj Magazine – have been altered on the book’s dust jacket. In fact, the lady’s identity has been changed; if I recall correctly she was Unwalla Feroze whereas now she has become Umaima Mullah Feroze. I remember thinking of our own Feroze Unwalla at Ogilvy when I first read the book. The book now has an inscription to my father as though it was a gift to him, whereas I remember the original book had his signature as always on the title page inside, and he had told me long ago that he had bought it at The Nalanda Bookshop at Taj Mahal Hotel, Mumbai.
Peripatetic Perch 