The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Creative Brand Strategy Audio Branding

TCS launches an anthem of hope to tie in with brand theme

Author

By Amit Bapna, Editor-at-large

October 21, 2021 | 6 min read

Tata Consultancy Services has launched the ‘TCS Belief Song’ to reiterate its vision of the new normal as the world opens up. The Drum gets Rajashree R, chief marketing officer at TCS, to share the genesis of the unusual music-led marketing route for a B2B tech player, how it fits into the company’s new positioning, and the casting process.

Tata Consultancy Services launches its anthem 'TCS Belief Song’

Tata Consultancy Services has launched its anthem ‘TCS Belief Song’

Leading global IT services and consulting brand Tata Consultancy Services has launched ‘TCS Belief Song’ to push the narrative of the new normal as the world gears up for a fresh start, and emphasizes the joy of human connection. The just-launched anthem video features TCS employees and their families as the brand ambassadors.

Deploying music for brand messaging

TCS had launched its new brand platform around ‘Building on Belief’ messaging earlier in April, and the anthem takes that message forward in a post-pandemic world as the world is coming out of its brutal aftermath.

Rajashree R, chief marketing officer, TCS, says: “After much brainstorming, we felt that a song could be the vehicle to articulate the brand positioning with great emotion, as it could help create a sense of pride and passion.” It ties very beautifully with the overall brand theme of TCS, she adds.

Pushing the message of the song beyond the obvious

After a very difficult last one-and-a-half years, the world is individually and collectively looking at the future with a great sense of hope, and that’s the core message, shares Rajashree. It’s a message of hope as things are opening up and everyone is looking forward to the world ahead. The anthem is also a thank-you message for all the frontline workers, the scientists and everybody else who has helped in coping with this pandemic, she adds.

Interestingly it has been created as a song for everyone – just a happy and peppy song that can be listened to as part of a normal playlist. “It was created with TCS in mind, but it’s meant for everybody who loves to listen to good music,” she says. To ensure that people get to see the song organically, it is being put out on platforms including Spotify and Apple Music too.

Pushing it out for a global audience

When you have half a million employees, the usual methods of sending an email or using the employee portal don’t give us the kind of results that we want because you are trying to reach out to so many employees who are globally spread, shares Rajashree. One of the first things the company did to push the anthem out was to play it to some of its global employees in the UK and the US to see their reaction to the song’s global appeal.

Plans are to do many cover versions of it and people are already being encouraged to do language versions, she says. There is a team in Latin America that has offered to do a Latin version of the song.

Taking the unconventional marketing route for a B2B brand

For a company whose primary employee age group is 25-30, it is critical to communicate to them in their language. The music anthem is one such route to appeal to that audience base. Not just that, TCS has also started things such as memes in addition to songs and interesting videos to communicate with its employees. Rajashree says: “We will take cues from pop culture and incorporate them to communicate our brand message.”

Some months back, the company introduced shorts on its website backed by the insight that people can’t read long whitepapers, and they probably need a ‘stories’ method of consuming information. As a marketer, it is imperative to understand how people are consuming information and be able to change the communication strategy to fit in, she adds.

Behind the scenes: the brief and the casting process

  • “When we started working on the song, I remember telling Siddharth Mahadevan (the creator of the anthem) that I wanted something like ‘We are the world,’ and he almost thought I had gone crazy because that’s an iconic song. The brief was simple: create a very hummable song, and [one that was] also very global pop in the way it was constructed.

  • “The first thing we wanted to do was to get TCS employees to sing it. However, as we were right in the middle of the second pandemic, that did not work out as getting all these people in to do high-quality recording was very difficult. Now a lot of our colleagues have come back to us and shared their plans of wanting to do remix versions, dance beat versions. Let’s wait and watch.

  • “About the casting, we were sure that it had been for TCS and by TCS. We went through a very elaborate process of getting our employees to give us videos of them singing the song along with their family.”

Creative Brand Strategy Audio Branding

More from Creative

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +