/work/open brief·03·speculative
IndiGo.
“IndiGo carries six in every ten Indians who fly. They have the brand equity of a wholesale rice supplier.”
IndiGo won the Indian market on punctuality and price. Now the whole category is on time and cheap, and the airline is stretching into business class, widebodies and the A321XLR - all without a brand voice that can hold any of it. The brief also lands during the biggest leadership transition in the airline's history.
Brand voice · positioning reset
the state of play
IndiGo flies more domestic passengers than the rest of the Indian industry combined and is among the larger airlines globally by passenger count. The original 2006 positioning - On Time. Hassle-Free. Low Fares. - was honest and effective for fifteen years. It is now a description of the entire category. The recent expansion into a business-class product (IndiGoStretch), damp-leased Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners scaling European routes, a firm order for sixty Airbus A350-900 widebodies, and the newly inducted Airbus A321XLR fleet have stretched the airline into segments the brand has no language for. Each operational move is sound and brand-mute. The brief lands inside the largest leadership transition in IndiGo's history: Pieter Elbers exited after operational disputes; the board has appointed Willie Walsh - former British Airways CEO, former IATA Director-General - to take the helm by August 2026.
the thesis
The opposite of luxury is not cheap - it is competence. IndiGo's defensible asset is operational competence: pilots who land on time, ground staff who do not argue, gates that close on schedule. We would treat competence as the entire aesthetic, not apologise for it.
what we'd do
- 01
Brand voice rewrite. Drop the cheerful service-class English in favour of a flat, declarative register. Confident. No exclamation marks anywhere.
- 02
Visual refresh that keeps the blue and the wordmark, kills the gradient on the logotype, and introduces a single custom mono for all secondary type.
- 03
Launch a 'How We Land On Time' content series - eight short films, one per operational discipline (fuel planning, slot bidding, dispatch, turnaround). Boring on purpose. The boring is the brand.
- 04
Treat IndiGoStretch as a sub-brand, not a variant. The product is twelve seats in a 2-2 configuration on major metro routes - premium territory the master brand has no language for. Distinct typography, distinct livery accent, distinct copy register. Premium product, separate room.
- 05
Replace the existing Hello 6E inflight magazine with a thirty-two-page newsprint quarterly - three articles, no advertising, written by aviation journalists rather than agency copywriters.
the first 90 days
Forty flights in thirty days, every route over ninety minutes, seat at the back. The next month is in the InterGlobe headquarters and the Gurugram operations centre. The third month produces a voice document and a six-month rollout plan, timed to land in front of Willie Walsh as he formally takes the CEO seat in August. Walsh ran British Airways and IATA on a reputation for killing corporate fluff - the brief is written for a reader already inclined to believe the thesis. Voice changes are leadership decisions, not marketing ones.
the team we'd assemble
- StrategyONNOFF
- Brand VoiceONNOFF, with an embedded IndiGo writer
- IdentitySimran
- FilmAyush
what we don't know yet
Whether the InterGlobe leadership wants a brand that signals confidence or one that signals friendliness. Those are different briefs and they cannot both be the answer. We would argue for confidence.
this is unsolicited. read it that way.
If you're at IndiGo and want to talk - hello@onnff.in