Facelift time for Titan

Fri, Jul 4 01:35 AM

When the two-decade-old Titan watches went in for a facelift for the first time in 2003-04, they reintroduced the improved brand with the tagline 'What's your style'. Four years hence, India's premier watch company, has opted for a facelift again, and this time with a new brand philosophy, a new tagline and new designs for its flagship brand Titan.

The rebranding is being done for the Aviator series, Octane collection, Raga crystals for women and Titan Heritage collection. "The new branding strategy is a result of a year-long study that we undertook in consultation with Future Brands and came to the conclusion that today's consumer seeks to be much more than what he or she is and wants to express multiple desires in his life.

As a result, we came up with the new tagline, 'Be more' that expresses this desire," said Harish Bhat, COO, Watches, Titan Industries Ltd adding that the need to reinvent was felt because the company believes that truly iconic brands are those that have a strong consumer connect. "The rebranding will extend not only to a new ad campaign featuring brand ambassador Aamir Khan, but will also be reflected in new collections in the Titan range as well as a new retailing experience through a new ambience at our retail outlets," Bhat said.

The new retail experience will include the launch of 10 new collections in the Titan range over the next one year with each of these new collections consisting of 25-35 new watch designs. But wouldn't sales suffer because of growing inflation? Bhat disagreed: "Titan has always been an affordable watch brand and apart from that, watches as a category haven't really been affected by it as the Indian consumer graduates from having just one watch to buying multiple watches for multiple occasions.

" Future Brands, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Future Group was the consultant to Titan for the rebranding strategy. "We found that watches are moving from being a functional object to an accessory and therefore we came up with the idea that Titan should be far more than what a watch stands for in the traditional sense.

Over the one year that we were working on the brand we actually took time to introspect and re-looked at the category and the brand to help Titan come up with this strategy," Santosh Desai MD and CEO, Future Brands said. Titan today enjoys a 65 per cent market share in an organised watch market, which consists of 15 million watches of the overall 40 million watches market in India.

"We sold 10 million watches last year of which about four million were from the Titan brand," Bhat said.

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