A global brand with an Indian heart

FutureBrand were tasked with creating India's first truly global brand: an international airline with an Indian heart. With the brand strategy and identity finalised, the new Air India brand had to shape day-to-day behaviour and, ultimately, a customer experience to match its ambition.

How should the new brand platform inform how the airline operates, and what does that mean for both employees and customers?

Using the brand strategy as a starting point, I created a series of behavioural principles that added experiential coordinates to demonstrate what and how the new brand could enable for staff, in their day-to-day work.

I then designed and facilitated a one-day experience workshop in Delhi with 100 Air India employees. The session used the new brand to role-play how to behave when things went wrong across a range of scenarios. Participants were then encouraged to make departmental commitments as to how they would use the new behaviours in their specific roles.

The last part of the workshop used these new behaviours to explore how the customer experience on the ground and in the air might be improved, and where the opportunities to create elevated brand experiences might be found.

With over 50 individual improvements to the customer journey identified, we synthesised them into four key opportunity areas, linked by a singular experience strategy: to be 'The Best of Quintessential Indian Hospitality'. Each idea was ranked against an Effort vs Impact matrix and added to an innovation backlog for prioritisation.

Air India's order of 470 new aircraft, one of the largest in commercial aviation history, is being delivered over the coming years. The new brand experience gives the airline a blueprint for rebuilding its customer reputation at the same scale. A distinctly Indian tea service and a new service focus for families and elderly travellers came directly from the Delhi workshop.

The work fed a wider transformation that has taken Air India's NPS from -35 to nearly +40. In June 2026, the airline recorded its highest-ever NPS.