New Delhi: Wipro Ltd, India’s third biggest software services firm, has redesigned its brand identity, abandoning the iconic rainbow flower logo with the tagline ‘Applying Thought’.
Designed by WPP Group’s strategic brand and design consulting firm Landor India, the new logo has the company’s name on a plain white background, surrounded by colourful dots in concentric circles.
According to Wipro, the new logo represents the way the company “connects the dots” for its clients, integrating deep technology and domain expertise, applying insights from across industries.
The styling of the brand mark gives a sense of fluidity, resourcefulness, optimism and a connected world, while the four circles represent Wipro’s values, employees, clients and partners and communities, the company said.
While the new logo has undergone a complete design overhaul, the company has retained the rainbow colour scheme.
“The new brand identity marks Wipro’s emergence as a trusted digital transformation partner to clients, delivering at global scale with increasingly localised capabilities, and leveraging hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics, cognitive and emerging technologies. It also signifies a higher level of engagement and brand permission that helps clients leverage Wipro’s expertise to address their business requirements and drive future opportunities in this digital era,” Wipro said in a press release.
Design and branding experts are divided in their opinion about the new logo.
The new logo is contemporary and will play out well on digital platforms, said Ambi M.G. Parameswaran, brand strategist and founder of Brand-Building.com, who was part of the team that designed Wipro’s old rainbow flower brand identity.
“Wipro had a white and black static logo in the 80s and it moved to the rainbow flower logo in 1998. It was apt at that point of time because the company had a diverse portfolio including businesses in IT, consumer products, lighting among others. The objective was to bring them under a single identity, and the baseline reflected how the company put its best in each business division,” Parameswaran said.
“The company is planning its next growth trajectory by unveiling the new logo, keeping digital at its core,” he said.
As a brand, Wipro has evolved from being a company that once manufactured vanaspati (hydrogenated vegetable oil) and soaps to becoming one of India’s biggest companies in the information technology industry.
Independent brand expert Harish Bijoor says that the new logo is not just contemporary but it also reflects clarity and simplicity.
“It represents the forward-thinking approach of Wipro while retaining a certain degree of continuity in the form of the colour scheme,” he said.
But design expert Bhupal Ramnathkar, founder of Umbrella Design, said he cannot shrug off the feeling that the new logo seems better suited for a paint company.
“At first glance it looks like a paint company logo because of this rainbow colour dots which are overpowering the company name. When used on any digital medium, it will diminish the visibility of the company name, killing the whole purpose of the logo. I believe that a big company’s logo should be simple, like that of Apple or an IBM,” he said.
Agreeing with Ramnathkar, Shekhar Badve, founder of Lokusdesign, said he finds the new logo frivolous, confused and force-fitted.
“The new logo is extremely close to the design of auto-parts maker Visteon Corp. and Thomson Reuters’ logos. The type is stretched and is dwarfed in front of the radiating dots. The proportions used are poor creating a conflict of attention between the type and the dots,” he said.
Bengaluru-based Wipro was established as Western India Vegetable Products Ltd in Amalner, Maharashtra in 1945. It entered the IT industry in 1981 and became a pioneer in marketing indigenous personal computers in 1985. Following its listing on the NYSE in 2000, Wipro today has over 170,000 employees and posted gross revenue of $8.5 billion for the financial year ending 31 March.
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