A little girl comes crying to her brother’s room. He asks what happened and she says her tooth broke. He wipes her tears and consoles her. He takes the tooth and says, “Issko hum mitti mein boyenge aur ek bada sone ka daant niklega.” She picks up a broken tooth from her school’s playground and keeps it. She starts collecting teeth from dentures, skeletons in the school lab and wherever else she can find them. Next shot, her brother sees her digging a hole in the garden. He asks her what she’s doing and she says, “Main sone ke daant uga rahi hoon”. He asks why and she replies, “Kyunki aapki racing car ke liye paise ban jaayenge”. This is an ad for one of India’s largest state-run banks, Union Bank of India (UBI). The ad signals a new birth for the 90-year-old bank. UBI recently changed its corporate logo to identify itself in these changing times, and also launched two television commercials (TVCs) and four print ads.

This is just one of the many campaigns that state-owned banks have been coming up with to shed their worn-out image and be important to the youth. And it is not just ad films, but

logo changes, radio spots and outdoor advertising, which have been pulled out of the hat to make the neighbourhood government bank look swank.

Bank of Baroda (BoB) was the first public sector bank to go for an image makeover in 2005 with a new logo and a revamp of its Gen Next branches with bean bags and plasma TVs. Canara Bank, too, got a new logo in late 2007—two entwined triangles in blue and bright yellow. Sujata Keshavan, managing director, Ray & Keshavan, a WPP Group company responsible for brand image consulting for BoB, Canara Bank and Jammu & Kashmir Bank, says, “With public sector banks rubbing shoulders with private banks on the stock market index, they had to look profitable and rope in customers. Keeping this in mind, we used the sun in vermillion for BoB to show the spirit of enterprise—everyone would recognise the symbol. For Canara Bank, we did a study that showed there was no recall as far as the logo was concerned but they all remembered the colour—blue. So we used a fresher sky blue instead of the old cobalt blue to help communicate a brighter outlook. With a dash of yellow it was a positive and happy combination. For J&K Bank we used red for Jammu, green for Kashmir and blue for Ladakh. We combined the three and showed it as a bird.”

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