Objectives

A completely organic campaign launched on LinkedIn, with a goal to tell the world about TCS’ best kept secret – TCS Research.

While TCS is known for its excellence in services, few were aware that it is a research-led organization. In 2021, we introduced the "TCS Research" brand to honor a 40-year-old institution with an identity, personality and set of associations for the future.

There are few scientific research brands in existence today, and the ones that exist inspire people. TCS Research is one such brand.

To raise awareness of TCS Research, we conceptualized and launched a campaign that would not just introduce the new brand to the world, but also shed light on 40 years of high impact (yet underplayed) work. This campaign was called ‘40 and forward’ – 40+ stories that capture the journey of forty years of research at TCS.

Our goals for this campaign:

• Carving out a distinct identity for the TCS Research brand, a new yet 40-year old brand, under the umbrella of a large parent brand that has a legacy of being an IT services provider.

• Increasing brand awareness and recognition

• Building a strong narrative and establishing a brand voice.

• Making highly technical content consumable, using the art of storytelling.

• Invoking a sense of pride among current employees, increasing awareness of the TCS Research brand among customers, researchers, and society, attracting quality talent to further research, and making the TCS family aware of the hidden gem in their midst!

Strategy and Execution

With TCS celebrating 40 years of Research, It was the perfect time to tell the world about TCS Research! We launched the campaign to boost brand awareness.

Our strategy: We told 40 stories that aligned to our brand beliefs and targeted specific audience segments of our brand.

Our content strategy was to convert highly scientific content into consumable and easily understandable social media posts, using the art of storytelling.

The execution was a well-coordinated and truly collaborative affair, consolidating content in various formats and locations, dating back from the 1980s! Given that each post was created from internal content (and not simple online research/ideation), it was imperative to put a process in place. Here’s how we did it:

• Story selection: From the vast archives and roster of work that TCS Research had done since inception, several stories were collated. We picked the 40 that we felt best represented the company. View some of our social media posts aligned to our brand beliefs: Invention, People, Collaborations, and Benefit to Society.

• Content curation: A painstaking effort which involved scouring multiple internal and external archives for content – ranging from press releases in the 80s, book excerpts from the 90s, FTP video files from the 00s and internal PPTs from the 10s! We would also reach out to older scientists (often retired!) to get their perspective and quotes on work done years back. When we say collaborative, we truly mean it!

• Storytelling in scientific communication: We converted content into engaging and nostalgic visuals to convert scientific content into interesting stories. View here.

• We also explored visual styles ranging quote cards, carousels, photos, and videos. For the final post, we ended the campaign telling the world that we continue to keep our gaze on building a greater future while inventing with purpose, on shared beliefs and for impact. 
• We celebrated special calendar days and aligned stories with these reactive days for more visibility - World Literacy Day, White Cane Day, and others.
• LinkedIn was chosen as the platform for this campaign, given the nature of the content and our audience segments.
• Some of the notable stories from the campaign have found a permanent place on a page on our website.

A new campaign like this faced several challenges:

• Organic social media proved to be an exhilarating journey of exploration and experimentation. Being a newly launched handle on LinkedIn, there was much to explore. This helped us refine our content to garner engagement completely organically.
• Perception change: TCS is perceived as an excellent IT services provider. The world needed to know that it is more, by bringing to the fore TCS Research’s scientific and technological contributions. 
• Technical nature of content: Scientific content is difficult to understand for a non-expert reader. It needed to be simplified to make it consumable without making it sound trivial
• Standing out: The campaign needed to stand out in a product and web-dominated world. An innovative spin to scientific communications was required to ensure high brand recognition and recall.

Results

• Our brand awareness campaign did wonders in introducing the brand to the world, and shedding light on 40 years of high impact (yet underplayed) work.
• Messaging was tailored to directly resonate with people, a hard act to do for a B2B business, but essential to create high brand recall.
• Our major innovation for the campaign was breaking down complex stories into very consumable, social-media friendly stories that invoked nostalgia and inspiration.
• One could say that our 40 ideas from the past were strung together by a powerful one from today – storytelling!

The organic campaign contributed tremendously to brand awareness:

• Earned almost 400% increase in followers (from around 8,400 to 35204) completely organically.

• more than 2.5+ million impressions,

• 0.22 million engagements on LinkedIn, and

• had an average engagement rate of 9%.

• More than 3000+ people clicked on the custom links on the social media posts to know more on the website.

• 700+ mentions of TCS Research on LinkedIn during the campaign.

• The posts in the campaign helped create a sense of nostalgia and instill pride in our current scientists, researchers, and alumni - View comments on our posts here, and here.

• Each story resonated well with external and internal audiences. View here.

This campaign, aptly called ‘40 and forward’ – helped capture the passion, scientific rigor, and the impact throughout the journey of forty years of research at TCS.

It has spurred our growth on LinkedIn and beyond, tremendously contributing to recognition, awareness, and recall of the TCS Research brand.

Media