The makeover.

Airtel. You have been grifted. Sources say you paid close to 66Million USD for an image makeover. Tell me now, does the end result seem worth all that money?? Here is a small image below, to cement my point.

Airtel say they needed a new more youthful brand image. Granted the old logo was ageing, but with the new one, it has lost its identity. The similarity to Vodafone is just too obvious. Just today, I was driving by a road and as I stopped at a traffic light I casually scanned the shops by the roadside. There was just too much red. Infact, what stood out was the blue of Uninor and multicoloured hue of Tata Docomo. The red of vodafone and airtel just was too overwhelming. To add to that we also have virgin mobile and MTS. Clearly someone got the concept of painting the town red all wrong.

Forgetting the colour scheme we move onto the shape of the logo. Seriously is that the best they could come up with? I find their attempt to be somewhat half-hearted and is not exactly all that vibrant and youthful. Somehow, the effort that went into revamping the bharti logo a few years back seems to have evaporated when it came to doing the same for their actual public brand.

The one that that I do like about the new concept is the slew of adverts that they have come up with. The conception is really beautiful. A gripe is that they are creating all this hype about the 3G services, but not saying anything about when exactly they will be available. Business line sources say end of december, but an airtel employee who is trying to promote the 3G service at a stall in a local mall says, I don't know. Somehow I feel Airtel is giving away the 3G advantage to services like Tata Docomo because they are actually promoting a service that they don't have yet while a someone else does have it.

I am not a marketing or branding expert, but as the average gadget friendly user I have to say the new campaign does not really make the cut, though of course I will be sticking on to Airtel because I use it and prefer using it.