How Mint revamped itself for the millennial readers

It put out a new tagline 'Think Ahead. Think Growth', unified its offline and online identities, and let go of the Mint coin.

“At a time when businesses and the economy are going through challenging times, we've put out a straightforward message with our new tagline: 'Think Ahead. Think Growth,’” said Anuradha Sehgal, business head, Mint.

Mint is one of India’s leading business newspapers and enjoys high credibility and saliency among India’s CXOs and Livemint.com has been the fastest growing business news website in recent times said Sehgal and went on to say “Our goal was to now make Mint the most preferred business read among millennial readers.”

Mint wanted to let people know that its desire for growth, personal and professional, will be met by credible news and insight served up by its journalists and columnists; it launched a campaign "Growth is On".

“We tweaked the logo to make it more contemporary, implemented a unified brand identity across the print and digital platforms and put in place a cleaner brand architecture,” remarked Sehgal.

Detailing the process, she said putting together the campaign involved passionate brainstorming sessions with our creative partners in Black Swan Life, scouring over scores of videos to pick the right ones… stitching disparate video clips beautifully so it felt like they always belonged together… All under lockdown, on calls and video calls between people sitting in Delhi, Singapore, Mumbai, Lucknow.

Sukumar Menon, creative head and founder of Black Swan Limited told us they were tasked to define the Brand and create Mint’s first-ever Brand Campaign keeping the business reader of today in mind.

Taking us through the ideation process, said Menon, “‘Growth’ in the context of the business reader became the idea for the brand. Then COVID-19 happened…” He went on to say that both agency and client had to introspect (thanks to the pandemic) and “what was earlier an idea that we all felt very close to, had now become a hard reality that we are all living with - is 'Growth' still as convincing an argument?” And in questioning that it became very apparent that there’s no better time than now to talk about it.

Ameya Soman, design head, Black Swan Limited said the brand had two different identities: MINT (offline) and LiveMINT (online and app). It was leading to an unnecessary split in its equity and fall in its recall value, and its identity needed to get in shape to play the pixels' game.

“To the first challenge, we decided to drop 'Live' from its digital identity and unified everything under 'MINT'. For the latter, we worked extensively on the typography of the identity. Even some of the minor tweaks such as making the serifs thinner and shorter had a huge impact like increasing its legibility on really small/low-resolution screens,” explained Soman.

He went on to add that they had to let the Mint (coin) go with a heavy heart and firm mind but while doing the refresh we ensured that the core of the brand was not lost from the identity.