Grasim Industries – visual storytelling for its 75th anniversary

Brief

Create a visual story for Grasim's 75th anniversary that brings to life its journey and its role in building a post-independence India.

Execution:

Challenge

Content curation, multiple formats, short timeline and technology.

It was important to write a story that would narrate Grasim 75 glorious years in more than just words. We were given the freedom to experiment with the structure and format of the article, and the existing website template. However, that posed to be the biggest challenge was putting together seven decades' worth of monumental work in one 700-word article. Plus, we only had two weeks to curate content, build the narrative and the copy, create the page structure, and code the page.

Approach

While the ask was straightforward, we decided to make the story more interesting by adding anecdotes and unheard stories from few of Grasim's earliest employees. We wanted to include their pictures and voice, and trace the company's evolution over the past seven decades while making an immense contribution to India's industrial growth.

To begin with, we first put together a simple structure from secondary research and divided the story decade wise. Once we decided what we wanted to include, the team conducted interviews with ex-employees from each decade and dived into the archives. The interviews helped us uncover some exciting stories from Grasim's early days and trace the evolution of its people-first culture. We also discovered Grasim's incorporation letter from 1947, that has been carefully preserved till today and included in this visual story.

We embedded some employee interviews in video format to get a first-hand feel of their experience of working with Grasim. With older employees from the 60s and 70s, we conducted phone interviews. Where language and audio quality posed a challenge, we converted the audio into text and used their quotes with pictures to strengthen the narrative. We also included leadership quotes of Mr G. D. Birla, Mr Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman, Aditya Birla Group and Mr. Dilip Gaur, Managing Director, Grasim Industries Ltd. to add value to the story.

Results

At TIC, visual storytelling is more than just infographics and numbers. We have consciously tried to use different content formats (video, text and audio) and moved away from existing website templates to create an immersive experience for the user while staying true to the story that we are narrating. You can experience the story here – www.adityabirla.com/media/stories/75-glorious-years-of-grasim

Do you want to showcase your company's success stories? We would love to partner you to generate original content that meets your business needs. Please contact us at solutions@ticworks.com