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Infosys: Building a brand for the future

Brand Finance
21 January 2025

Infosys' brand value has increased by 15% to USD16.3 billion, making it the fastest-growing IT Services brand over the past 5 years, and the third most valuable IT Services brand globally. This notable brand value increase is coupled with an uptick in its brand strength index score to 85.8/100, now commanding an AAA rating.

In a recent interview with Brand Finance, Sumit Virmani, CMO of Infosys, shares insights into the company’s remarkable eight-year streak of consistent brand value growth. He reveals the core strategies that have powered Infosys' success, from embracing technological innovation through strategic partnerships to building sub-brands like Infosys Cobalt and Infosys Topaz. Virmani also discusses how Infosys has leveraged AI and purpose-driven marketing to create meaningful customer experiences and fuel long-term growth.

Interview with Sumit Virmani

Sumit Virmani
CMO,
Infosys

Infosys has achieved consistent brand value growth for eight consecutive years. What would you say are the core building blocks that have powered this success?

Our efforts are consistently to build Infosys into one of the most respected IT services brands in the industry, deeply differentiated in its ability to help clients navigate a cloud-first, AI-first world. We orchestrate our efforts to ensure brand Infosys is always evolving to remain relevant and responsive to the changing needs of our stakeholders – after all, our brand promise is ‘navigate your next’. At the same time, we make sure that the brand remains unchanging in its commitment to live its purpose - amplifying human potential and creating the next opportunity for all. Balancing that dichotomy is what’s working well for us.

Over the years, some strategic choices have served us well:

Partnerships: Nearly eight years ago, we started to turn our key brand partnerships into platforms that showcase our core technology capabilities. Take, for example, our tennis partnerships. Eight years ago, if you were following a tennis grand slam, the only stats you could access, as a fan, were scores and serve speeds. Several insights were missing - the spin of the serve, the angle of the winner, head-tohead comparisons, player performance under pressure, and more. These insights are so valuable for players, their coaches, sports journalists, and millions of fans. Today, Infosys AI and analytics capabilities make sure it’s all out there for the tennis ecosystem to follow. And for our brand, it’s a great way to showcase our differentiated capabilities to the market.

Productised approach to sub-brands: The world of technology services, unlike the software products space, does not have differentiated offering-brands. We sought to create sub-brands in new and emerging categories to strengthen brand Infosys. Infosys Cobalt and Infosys Topaz are two examples. Infosys Cobalt is the first cloud services brand in our entire industry. And Infosys Topaz is the first AI services brand. We borrowed the idea of category-brands, not uncommon in other industries, and use it as a lever to accelerate differentiation for Infosys.

Platform - A state of the art marketing tech stack: We set up a modern marketing tech stack. In addition to driving efficiency of our marketing investments, it helps us track marketing ROI and measure brand engagement, effectiveness, and its correlation to business outcomes. This is invaluable for measuring brand impact.

Purpose: While we have been a brand that is driven by a deep sense of values over the last four decades, we have codified this into our purpose over the last few years. This now guides all our stakeholders, across all of our engagements and investments – so we present ourselves not only consistently but also authentically as a brand. For Infosys, our purpose is ‘to amplify human potential to create the next opportunity for people businesses and communities’.

Performance Metrics: While the partnerships, sub brands, tech stack and a well-articulated purpose serve us well, we also make sure it’s all coming together to deliver results for the business – both in the short and the medium terms. To help stay focused on those metrics, we have developed a brand and business impact framework that focuses on measuring brand preference, awareness, and consideration along with their correlation to long-term market share gains.

While AI offers numerous potential benefits, it also presents risks. How has brand-building at Infosys adapted to the rapid advancements in AI?

AI can indeed be a double-edged sword if not embraced responsibly. We believe that AI is one of the most disruptive opportunities presented to us marketers and our AI-first approach to brand building reflects that. We have been experimenting with the innovation potential of the technology and our own AI-first suite of services, Infosys Topaz, has been integral to powering many of these advances.

We balance rapid innovation with responsibly scaled enterprise-wide implementations harnessing both our AI Foundry and AI Factory.

For example, our marketing teams routinely create secure AI platforms and experiences that run as part of our digital and social media campaigns.

Our campaign RafaForever empowered a billion tennis fans to celebrate the legacy of tennis superstar, Rafa Nadal, by creating their own personalised celebration poster using our gen AI-powered platform. Another example is the AI-first approach to our annual report in 2024. This provided every shareholder the opportunity to create a personalised cover for themselves. These are examples of how gen AI can truly democratise creativity and create personalised and fulfilling experiences.

Infosys’ brand strength has been on an upward trajectory since 2019, reaching an all-time high in 2025. What plans or approach do you have in place to continue this growth in brand strength?

Our brand, we’ve always believed, is the intangible asset that creates an emotion bridge between our business and our customers. We also know brand strength has a tangible correlation to growth, market share gains, and profitability. Our brand and business impact framework, that I referred to earlier, helps us remain focused.

We have always aspired to maintain a fine balance between short-term focused performance marketing and long-term focused brand marketing. In addition, the right balance between performance, promise, and purpose is at the heart of building brands that last. At Infosys, that philosophy is integral to our business strategy and that balance helps us maintain focus on nurturing our brand as a valuable intangible asset for the long-term.

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