Tax Talk

Brand Management for the Department of Direct Taxes was the topic for a small invited talk (not 'small talk') that I gave at a gathering of Chief Commissioners of Income Tax at their training centre in Nagpur. Rather intimidating, at first sight, you would think (and I thought). But we got along well, and nobody asked me for my PAN number at the end- so the revenge motive is ruled out.

Seriously, it was quite interesting to talk about marketing and branding to people from a government department. After all, it is a monopoly, and with a lot of power, so what would it be doing with marketing? I had to also think differently, and came up with a passable presentation based on basics of services marketing- the 7 Ps. We came up with a positioning statement for the dept. to uplift its image or give it a positive spin- call themselves 'Bankers to the Nation'. The trouble is, State Bank of India already uses the tagline. So we left the concept at that and moved on. There was a also a lively discussion about Mr. Nilekani and his project called Unique ID that seeks to generate one for every Indian. I also put forth my pet theory that Indian post offices along with e-seva centres can be used to deliver almost every known government service that a citizen needs in his lifetime, including driving license, passport, ration card, marriage, birth and death registration, and so on.

In general, the ideas that the image is important even for a govt. department went down well. We had an added bonus in the form of a TV crew that shot a few moments of our session for a documentary film on the tax dept. that they were shooting.