TITAN AT CORE

As a mass brand operating with several different collections and sub brands, Titan had become accustomed to defining each of its products via the sub brand/collection design codes. Thus each watch would be moulded according to the trend of the moment (which works like a seasonal fruit) and the sub brand codes. However, there was no visioning exercise done to align all the watches across different categories under one central Titan narrative.

The old system of having the main themes of functionality, desirability, authenticity, dynamism and expressiveness needed to be recrafted to have stronger application. To illustrate this, we’ll take how some of the words are interpreted in a design sense. The word dynamism was thought out because of the idea that time is dynamic - always moving. However, the way this was often executed was to add a seconds hand to have the watch always ticking. As you can imagine, this did not have a profound impact on the design of the watches. Also with more premium offerings, the start stop movement of the seconds hand from a quartz movement was deemed as cheap. Titan also used the word ‘authenticity’. Indeed, authenticity is essential for watch companies as the industry focuses heavily on it. However, apart from the Raga and Edge sub brands, Titan had not hit a golden number with authenticity. Its watches, while being original in design, did not hit a thread that made it memorable to users. Thus in order to lay down the golden thread that would pass through all collections and sub brands to harmonize them, it was necessary to define the brand.

The last time Titan had rebranded themselves was in 2002 and it marked a shift of the brand from being solely about timekeeping to being about lifestyle and fashion. The rebranding exercise had been done by Sujata Keshavan, legendary NID alumni, and ever since Titan had apprehensions about getting the rebranding done by an external consultants. There was a lot of talk within the company about alignment but such an exercise would be challenging and the design team would not be able to take out time from the normal day to day design to work on a project of this kind. Thus with this crisis, came opportunity.

Defining a brand is not easy and it can’t be done in isolation. It needs to take into account what all stakeholders have to say. As an intern, it was difficult to get appointments with people in different departments. The sad truth is that no one takes an intern seriously and interns rarely know how to speak in terms of what the other person wants. Thus to the readers of this document, I would recommend you to make friends early on in the project with as many people as possible within the company. Catch people over chai and coffee breaks to talk about the things you need to discuss with them. Waiting for an appointment is only going to delay your process, the writer learnt the hard way. During the course of the project it helped to form rapport by joining in one the group games and events. These are social lubricants that give one a chance to talk to people without the raised mental guard that you would find them in at the workplace.

Each brand definition method has limitations and counter arguments. We’ll go through several methods that were used in this project. A designer needs to think of the attributes that arise from a gutt perspective to be able to make sense and convert these into the actual business of design