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In early 2008, HCL Enterprise1 (HCL), one of
the leading information technology companies in India, launched
a new TV commercial aimed at showcasing its technology prowess.
The ad was a sequel to the 'Technology that touches lives'
campaign launched the previous year. The company, which
considered itself "India's original garage IT start-up" as it
had more than a three decade heritage in this sunshine sector,
felt that the new ad campaign would help reinforce its
positioning as an innovative company that had used technology to
improve the quality of people's lives.
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In the mid-2000s, the company felt the need to unify
its various businesses and connect with all its stakeholders. It also
realized that despite being a dominant player in the IT sector, it had
never made a serious effort to project that image and that this had
resulted in other companies in the sector becoming more visible.
So, in 2005, the company initiated 'Project Heartbeat' aimed at creating
a unified HCL brand.2 As part of the project, the various diverse
entities operating under the HCL name were consolidated under two
umbrella companies - HCL Technologies (Engineering & R&D, Enterprise &
Custom Applications, infrastructure, Management & BPO Services for
Global Market) and HCL Infosystems (Hardware, System, Integration & ICT
Distribution for the Indian Market). It also worked on a new logo and
started a global branding campaign with the help of leading ad agency
Draft FCB Ulka.3
The global branding initiatives were started in April 2005 with the
'Fearless' campaign. This was a print-led TV campaign that sought to
enlighten the various stakeholders on the company's scale, heritage, and
core values - Guts, Courage, and Passion.
It used messages such as 'You don't have more courage when you are
young. You have less fear', 'What does it take to become a founding
member of the US$2 billion club? Courage', and, 'At HCL there's only one
thing more important than brains. Guts.'
The branding initiative was taken forward in the following year by the
'The Numbers do the talking' campaign, that tried to tell the viewer how
HCL touched the lives of people across various segments such as BPO,
Banking, Aerospace, and Biomedical, through the dialogues of the
animated characters '0' and '1'.4
In 2007, in the third phase of the global branding initiative, the
'Technology that touches lives' campaign was launched to project the
importance of HCL's technology in people's everyday life. The challenge
the company and the ad agency faced was to do all this in just 60
seconds.
The ad campaign strove to show the world through the eyes of the common
man who was not aware of the many ways in which HCL touched his life
everyday. The ad showed a chance encounter between an investment banker
and a hitchhiker (a HCL employee).
It went on to show how the HCL employee explains to the banker how HCL
touches the lives of people (for instance, in the car safety solutions
space, powering stock market software, ATMs, and rural computers that
run on car batteries).
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1] HCL Enterprise, headquartered in Noida, India, is one of India's largest electronics, computing, and information technology companies with annual revenues of US$ 4.7 billion (in 2007).
2] Meenakshi Radhakrishnan-Swami, "HCL: Wooing the Masses," www.rediff.com, January 26, 2006.
3] Draft FCB Ulka is one of the leading ad agencies, and a part of the US-based marketing communication major Interpublic Group.
4] Interestingly, 1 and 0 are the building blocks of the digital world. |
