TCS Brand Guidelines: Tata Sons’ 1968 Consultancy, Three Taglines and the City Marathons

A consultancy inside a group.

Tata Consultancy Services was set up in 1968 by Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata Group, and it is still majority-owned by Tata Sons, English Wikipedia says. The company itself dates its work “since its inception in 1968” on the Tata Group’s website, which lists its shares on the BSE and the National Stock Exchange of India under the symbol TCS. Its headquarters are in Mumbai.

Its first contracts came from close to home, from other parts of the Tata Group and from Indian institutions. English Wikipedia lists punched-card services for TISCO, the group’s steel company now called Tata Steel, a reconciliation system for the Central Bank of India and bureau services for the Unit Trust of India. Its first chief executive, F. C. Kohli, led it from 1968 to 1996.

Overseas work followed in the 1970s, when TCS built an electronic depository and trading system for a Swiss company and worked on automating the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, English Wikipedia says; it also developed a system for the Canadian Depository System. Ahead of the year 2000 and the launch of the euro, it built what Wikipedia calls a factory model for converting old code, with its own tools to automate the work. In the early 1980s it opened a research centre in Pune, the Tata Research Development and Design Centre, and an offshore development centre dedicated to a single client, Tandem.

Three taglines in two decades.

TCS has described itself in a short line since the late 1990s. English Wikipedia records that it registered its first tagline, “Beyond the Obvious,” in 1999, and replaced it in 2005 with “Experience Certainty.” On 30 March 2021 it unveiled a new brand statement, “Building on Belief,” the Times of India reported, describing a brand promise built on long-term partnerships, innovation and “collective knowledge.” The paper, which called TCS “India’s largest IT services firm,” reported that the statement would be activated in the following weeks and used across the marathons the company supports, with a campaign aimed at its own staff through town halls.

The listing came in the middle of that period. TCS held its initial public offering and became a listed company on 25 August 2004, English Wikipedia says; in July 2005 Tata Infotech, a separate Tata IT company, merged into it.

Its products carry the TCS initials. English Wikipedia names TCS BaNCS, a banking platform, along with TCS Quartz, TCS HOBS, TCS MasterCraft and TCS OmniStore, and the learning and assessment unit TCS iON. In 2015 it started Digitate, based in Pune and Santa Clara, which released the AI platform ignio that year. Public-sector work has been part of the record too: in 2006 TCS built an enterprise system for the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation, and in May 2021 it was selected, with its consortium partner Neurotechnology, by the Unique Identification Authority of India to provide biometric technology for the Aadhaar identity programme.

Leadership has passed through five chief executives: Kohli; Subramaniam Ramadorai from 1996 to 2009; Natarajan Chandrasekaran from 2009 to 2017, now chairman; Rajesh Gopinathan from 2017 to 2023; and K. Krithivasan since 2023, according to English Wikipedia.

How IT services firms present themselves.

IT services and consulting firms sell work that is hard to photograph: software, systems, advice and the people who deliver them. Their identities therefore lean on a small set of tools. Wordmarks are usually set in a confident sans-serif, often in capitals or as a short set of initials, and palettes tend to sit in blues and purples, from deep navy to bright violet, used across websites, reports and event stands.

Their websites follow a familiar structure. Industry pages address banks, insurers, retailers, manufacturers and public bodies one by one, while capability pages cover cloud, data, cybersecurity, AI and consulting. Client case studies carry much of the proof, usually naming the customer and describing a programme of work rather than a product, and many firms publish their own research reports, surveys and indices to show expertise and to be quoted in the business press.

Place matters too. Delivery centres and offices are often photographed as campuses, with landscaped grounds, glass buildings and training halls, and those images recur across annual reports, recruitment material and news coverage. Careers pages speak directly to graduates and early-career engineers, with training programmes, campus recruitment and employee stories, alongside pages for experienced hires and alumni.

The last layer is public commitment. Sustainability reports, community programmes, education initiatives and sponsorships of sport and culture give the brand a presence beyond the client meeting, and in the case of sponsorship can put a company name on a stadium, a team shirt or a city race. The guides that follow look at how each firm uses those tools, and where its own history shows through.

A name on the start line.

The most public place for the TCS name is a road race. The Tata Group’s website says the company sponsors 14 marathons and endurance events, including the TCS New York City Marathon, the TCS London Marathon, the Tata Mumbai Marathon and the TCS Sydney Marathon; English Wikipedia adds Amsterdam and the Toronto Waterfront race to its title sponsorships. It has sponsored the Indian Premier League team Rajasthan Royals since 2009 and runs an annual IT quiz for school students, TCS IT Wiz. Motor racing is part of the mix too: it sponsors Jaguar Racing in Formula E. Research carries its name in New York, where the Tata Innovation Center stands on the Cornell Tech campus, and since 2007 it has run what it calls a co-innovation network of labs, start-up alliances and university partners.

Its scale is described in the company’s own terms. The Tata Group’s website speaks of a workforce spread across 56 countries and 194 service delivery centres, and English Wikipedia names Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad among its main delivery cities in India, including the Deccan Park campus in Hyderabad and the SIPCOT site in Chennai.

Its record includes long-running court cases in the United States. In October 2014 Epic Systems sued TCS and its American subsidiary over trade secrets; after a 2016 jury verdict and appeals, the case concluded in November 2023 with a settlement, English Wikipedia says. In 2019 Computer Sciences Corporation, now part of DXC Technology, filed a trade-secrets suit over the TCS BaNCS platform; after a 2023 jury verdict, the US Supreme Court declined to hear TCS’s appeal in June 2026, and the company increased its provision for the case.

For a design guide, TCS shows how a company inside a larger group can build a brand on initials, taglines and sponsorship rather than on a product people hold. Compare Infosys, the Bengaluru firm founded in 1981, and Wipro, another Indian IT services company. For this guide we use an indigo, a midnight blue and a violet with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep TCS’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.