R-ADAG rebranded as Reliance

MUMBAI: The Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group is rebranding all its businesses as ‘Reliance’ rather than maintaining individual identities for each service, the head of brand and marketing for Reliance Communication, Sanjay Behl told ET. Reliance Communications is the group’s Group’s telecom arm.

“The aim is to transition from multiple Reliance sub brands to a singular iconic Reliance master brand,” he said.

As a result, the group will lose the small ADAG tagline in several of its current logos and the suffix in brands like Reliance Mobile. All of these will now be branded as Reliance with descriptors like GSM or CDMA for the telecom business, Mr Behl said.

“The objective is contemporarising and strengthening the brand’s physical identity,” he said. He did not elaborate beyond this.

The company will also change some of the ‘Big’ brands that it uses in its entertainment business, for example Big Pictures will now become Reliance Pictures and Big TV will become Reliance Digital TV, he said.

The company will start rolling out the new brand identity from this month, he said, adding that much of the brand changes will be visible in the upcoming cricket tournament ICC World Cup.

ADAG is present in several businesses notably, telecom, power, infrastructure and entertainment.

In August this year, Anil Ambani, the group’s head, announced that he had resolved all differences with brother Mukesh, the chairman of RIL, India’s largest company by market capitalisation. These differences stemmed from differing interpretations of parts of a family settlement in 2005 which divided the group’s various businesses between the two brothers.

In the recent past, there been persistent rumours that Mukesh might buy a stake in RCOM, the telecom company. Such rumours have been strenously denied by both sides. On Thursday, ADAG sources described the dropping of ADAG as a simple rebranding exercise, unrelated to any strategic intent.