​What's In A Name?

A lot, especially in the hospitality industry where hotel chains are constantly reinventing themselves.

- Vir Sanghvi

A MONTH ago, the Taj Group finally made the announcement that the hotel and travel trade had long been expecting. At an elegant lunchtime function held at the flagship hotel in Mumbai, the company’s CEO Rakesh Sarna unveiled the Taj Group’s new branding. There were a few surprises. The struggling (but apparently, very nice) safari lodges got their own brand: Taj Safaris. The Delhi Taj got renamed Taj Mansingh officially, which is what everyone called it unofficially anyway.

But the big announcement was the rebirth of the Taj brand. Chinmai Sharma, the Taj’s Chief Revenue Officer,announced (by implication) that there would be no more Vivanta or Gateway hotels. Everything would be called Taj.

From a commercial point of view, the move made absolute sense. When you take hotels with the Taj brand (such as Mumbai’s The President) and downgrade them to Vivantas, you lose out on perceived value. Guests will expect to pay less for a second brand.

Then, there is the staff aspect. A three-tier structure creates a caste system within the company. A guy who works at a Taj property resents being shifted to a Vivanta.

And finally, there were the operational and conceptual imperatives. Nobody had properly thought through the branding when it was first implemented. An ad campaign for Gateway Hotels advertised a hip product that did not exist. The Vivantas had no unifying feature to give the brand an identity. The Connemara, which should be to Chennai what the Taj is to Mumbai or the West End is to Bengaluru, was downgraded to a Vivanta and put in the same category as the new, faceless, ugly hotels that the Taj had taken on management contracts.