New Delhi: The Tatas haven’t done anything ethically wrong in Tata Finance Ltd, and the current crisis will not have a major impact on the Tata brand, said Tata Sons executive director R Gopalakrishnan. He added that competitors may have a role in the vilification campaign in the Tata Finance issue, but said that he couldn’t say whether it was some sort of corporate war.

Giving examples of other brands that have come through crisis, Mr Gopalakrishnan said, "Every time a brand gets into controversy, it looks finished, but that is not so."

Speaking broadly about the Tata brand, which is worth Rs 10,000 crore at present, he said it is seen as "reliable, trustworthy" brand with a profile of a reassuring middle-aged person. He added that the organisation is going through major changes. The average layers of hierarchy in a Tata company have come down from around nine to three or five over the last few years. The group was now streamlining the organisation by often not filling the posts vacated through retirement, bringing in different kinds of executive separation schemes and taking a sharper look at non-performance.

Detailing the company’s changing HR profile, Mr Gopalakrishnan said that while 10 years back, the company had 3.2 lakh employees, of which around 22,000 were executives, now the group had around 2.3 lakh employees, of which around 38,000 were executives.

Speaking on the group’s future investment plans, Mr Gopalakrishnan said that the group’s money was mostly going into information technology and telecom sectors. He added that the company was looking at the branding aspect of its wireless in local loop (WiLL) service.

The company was mostly follows a three-tiered branding strategy, where the group’s name came first, followed by the generic product name, and then the specific name given to that product sub-category. The exceptions to this trend were brands like Tata Salt, Titan and Trent.

He also added that Tata Chemicals was examining the issue of entering branded food segment, though at this stage there was no concrete move.