The New Air India Identity: Looks International, Where is India?

Did you know there is a new International airline that the TATA Group has just launched.?It is called Luxe Air.??The brand identity has been carefully crafted to connote Luxury in the Air.??

The brand’s ambition is to place itself in the same circle as the top global airlines – Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Etihad, Cathay Pacific, Qatar Airways and Turkish Airlines.

First let’s consider the colours – gold and purple.?Gold dominates the eye and we all know that gold connotes unlimited wealth.?Purple is the colour of Royalty and we promise our travellers a royal flying experience.???

Red in this brand identity connotes our passion for giving travellers a luxurious experience in the air.??

The font is clean cut and modern, yet the slight leftward tilt gives the name a sense of sophistication and stylishness.

Coming to the visual mnemonic, the golden window.?The golden window indicates a vision for limitless possibilities, for showing that we can compete with the best in the world.

Hang on a minute, I thought, the TATAs have just completed a full rebranding for Air India.?Are you describing that???

Spot on…you have got it!!!?Luxe Airways is actually the new Air India.?The brand identity could work for any top-of-the-line, International Airline brand.?The new Air India is not India’s national airline, it need not be a carrier for Indian identity.?It’s an International Airline that happens to be based in India as an accident of history.?That’s the new chapter in the Air India story.

Of course, the Air India rebranding was going to be a tough one as it was surely likely to evoke a wide range of responses from various segments of India’s elite, those who fly abroad regularly and thus could be considered the true stakeholders of the brand.?Sure enough, on Linked In itself and in private conversations with professional colleagues, the responses to and assessments of the new brand identity have been wide and varied.

My point-of-view arises from my profession, one who studies signs, symbols and meaning for a living.

From a semiotic perspective, Identities are about belonging.?Brand Identities are about signalling both belonging and distinctiveness.??Who is your reference set, where you wish to belong??And in that set, how are you distinctive??These are the two questions that every well-designed brand identity is able to answer.

In the case of the Air India redesign, the reference set for belonging can be easily inferred from the design, it is the top tier of International airlines such as Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Etihad, Qatar Airways, Cathay Pacific and Turkish Airlines.?The new Air India wants to indicate that this is the circle in which it seeks to belong.?It wants to match these airlines in terms of the quality of flying experience that it seeks to deliver.??

It is in the area of brand distinctiveness, that the new identity fails, in my view.?The new identity wants to leave behind Air India’s past completely and promise a fresh start.?It tries to retain qualities/values from the past, such as luxury and royalty through the use of colours – gold and purple.?But this is a very loose connect with the past.

The new identity also wants to signal a future facing Air India, an airline that seeks to reinvent itself for today’s era of flying.?And for that, it is optimistic and imaginative, considering limitless possibilities.

For me, the problem with this future facing promise is that it is generic and could be claimed by any new, International airline.?That’s why, I wrote about it as the launch of a new airline called Luxe Air.

We must accept that Air India, now that it is owned by the TATA Group is not India’s national airline any more.?And as such has no compulsion or obligation to express an Indian identity or connect with its Indian heritage and roots, beyond the use of the word India in Air India.?The new Air India aims to be a global airline, a world-class airline that happens to be headquartered in India, as part of its legacy.?And that’s it.

Never-the-less, I do believe that the new identity reveals a deeper underlying malaise of identity that we Indians as a whole need to reflect upon.?The future facing India, one that is seeking its place with confidence on the world stage as an aspiring global power is a me-too country, playing catch up with the developed West and ahead of us in development, China.?Be it technology or industry, we are copying and catching up.?We have nothing original or interesting to offer the world in these spheres.

Everything that is truly distinctive about the Indian civilization belongs to our past and our heritage – be it our spiritual thought, yoga, meditation, classical music and dance, art forms. In these, we were original, very different from the creations of other peoples in other parts of the world. A future facing India does not have anything remotely comparable to offer the world of today, that our ancestors offered to the world that was, in previous eras.?Sadly, we still believe, that we need British designers to visualize our service quality for the world and construct our brand narrative for us.

Therefore, for me, what the new logo design reveals is a paucity of reflection, a lack of real knowledge or understanding of what makes today’s India great and an unwillingness to invest in deeper thought and creativity in proudly expressing who we are, to the world.?We took the easy way out – we got a British Agency to create a ‘global airline identity’ for us, to inform the world about our ambitions.

Hence, my question:?Looks International, where is India??In other words, the new Air India, I know where you want to belong, but what makes you distinctive among that set of world leading airlines? If you aren't Indian, then who are you?