City Branding: A lake town with a long game

Lula Raghavan, who heads up the Mumbai office of branding firm Landor Associates, reveals how a name and identity were created for a brand spanking new Indian city

What was the original brief?

This was the vision of Ajit Gulabchand, the CEO and Chairman of the Hindustan Construction Company, India’s largest construction company. He was looking at how India was developing and saw that our cities were very over populated, congested and polluted and that quality of life was declining. Being a builder he had a vision for an alternative to congested city living. He envisioned a 200,000 hectare development, a city around a lake, where people could live, learn and grow. It was inspired, in part, by hill stations like Darjeeling.

How did you come up with the name Lavasa?

The working name was Lake Town, but really that was a ‘full vessel’ and already had a meaning attached to it. So we coined the name Lavasa, which is very free-flowing and melodious but not derived from anything in particular. Lavasa is more open-ended than Lake Town and we wanted to create a name that could be filled with meaning over time. There was no brand similar to Lavasa and we didn’t want to limit the vision of the place.

What were the key challenges you faced with the project?

It wasn’t a huge challenge in terms of branding per se, but it was a challenge in terms of setting the right expectations. With Lavasa – and this is true of many visionary brands – the promise can get ahead of reality. You can promise one thing and then people arrive and can be disappointed by the reality. The first phase of
the city has been completed but it’s a 20-year work-in-progress, it’s not the type of brand that can be created and packaged in four weeks. Longevity is the key and we have a long-term strategy and a plan for each phase of the city’s evolution.

And how rewarding was it to work on building a city brand literally from the ground up?

Personally it feels like being involved in an important slice of history, working on a brand that has created a hallmark for how modern living could be, revolutionising how we see space.