'Why Did Mr Premji Ask Santosh About His Return Trip?'

In his latest book ‘SPONGE - Leadership Lessons I Learnt From My Clients’, brand strategist and ad veteran Ambi Parameswaran presents lessons learnt from his conversations with top rung advertisers, who are doyens of the corporate world. In this excerpt from the chapter ‘Value Quality Over Cost’, he tells us how Azim Premji of Wipro had a strong focus on cost control, what lessons one can learn from it, but also wonders whether extreme cost-control could run counter-productive to organisational culture

What happens to the costs that your vendor partner incurs? Where does it get added to your bills? Have you ever wondered about the implications of these hidden costs? We got a lesson on cost management some years ago from someone who knows more about this than any of us—Mr Azim Premji.

Our agency had been working on the Wipro Consumer Care division from the late ’80s and there was a great deal of mutual respect and regard between the agency and the client. This led us to being called to work on the corporate advertising account of Wipro in 1998.

As Wipro’s business had started to change dramatically in the late ’90s, the company had engaged a famous designer, Shombit Sengupta to revisualise what the company should stand for. After much consumer and customer research done across the country, the company decided to go with the ‘Rainbow Flower’ logo created by Shombit with the tag line ‘Applying Thought’ (the company has gone in for a new identity since, in 2017).

We were tasked with creating an advertising campaign to promote the new logo and to link it to the various aspects of the businesses of Wipro. The first campaign the agency team created was presented to Mr Premji and the consumer products marketing team. While the response from Mr Premji was positive, it was dismissed by some of the other key members of the Wipro IT leadership team.