India Seeking New Currency Logo

Branding is the key to marketing, and marketing is essential to promote anything. India sure is in the process of promoting itself. With the ruling party winning in the national elections, India will continue to attract foreign investment and continue on it’s path to being a economic power house.

India is definitely looking to market itself, it already has in the area of tourism and now it wants to distinguish its currency and create a brand which will be instantly recognized world wide. The current rupee does not have a symbol like the dollar sign or the pound sign and so India is on the lookout for a currency mark of it’s own. This branding and the new logo will be a symbol of India’s prominence in the world economy. To enable this there is design competition being held and the participants are awarded a prize. “This is a big brand-building exercise,” said Rajesh Jain, vice president at SMC Global Securities, a large brokerage firm in New Delhi. “When it gets a sign, the Indian rupee will aggressively declare to the world, ‘I have arrived.’ “

Some of India’s neighboring countries also use the term rupee to denote their currency, so the question then to ponder on is– will the rupee logo that India adopts be used by these neighboring countries too? If used then the branding exercise will become meaningless.