branding yoga case analysis

Branding Yoga

Harvard Business School Case

What Is Yoga ?


Yoga in Sanskrit Means ‘to add’

An Indian, physical, mental, and spiritual practice or discipline

Best Known are Hatha Yoga & Raja Yoga


What Is Branding ?


Process involved in creating a unique name and image for a product in

the consumers' mind


Who Are The Players ?


Bikram Choudhury

Suhag Shukla

People:-

Deepak Chopra

Tara Stiles


The Hindu American Foundation

Yoga Journal

Group:-


Why Study This Case ?


Objectives Of This Case….


Why Yoga Succeeded in US?

Reason for Popularity of Bikram

Choudhary & Tara Stiles

Can Yoga be branded?


History Of Yoga


Found in Indus Valley archaeological relics dated to 3rd millennium B.C.E

The Sanskrit word “yoga” literally meant to yoke and came from the root yuj, meaning “union”

One historian noted that yoga was “technically a part of three ‘world religions’: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism”

Hatha yoga, Bhakti yoga, Karma yoga, Jnana yoga, Raja yoga

Modern-day yoga reflected a plethora of ideas that teachers of yoga had passed down to their students over thousands of years


Yoga Comes To

America..



Began in the mid-19th century, when Indic and Hindu literature fascinated American Transcendentalista writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

In 1893, Swami Vivekananda, one of the first Hindus to bring yoga to the U.S., represented India and spoke about Hinduism at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago

In 1940, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, daughter of former President Woodrow Wilson, left the U.S. for an ashram in Pondicherry, India

In 1947, Indra Devi, a 48-year-old former Latvian film actress, arrived in the U.S. and opened a Hatha yoga studio in Los Angeles

In the 1940s and 1950s, Richard Hittleman, an American from New York City, began to teach Hatha yoga

wrote many popular books about yoga, with titles such as Yoga for Health; his television show, also called Yoga for Health, ran from 1961 to 1981

In 1966, B. K. S. Iyengar published Light on Yoga, which Yoga Journal claimed was “still considered to be the Bible of serious asana practice

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Maharishi and Chopra partnered to focus on mind-body medicine



In 2008, almost 16 million people in the U.S. were practitioners of

yoga

Bikram Choudhury

Professional Yoga Practitioner

Founder of the ‘Bikram Studios’



Born in 1946 in Calcutta, India

Studying yoga from age four under his guru, Bishnu Ghosh

At age 17, a weightlifting accident led doctors to conclude he would never walk

again, but Bikram went to Ghosh and used yoga to repair his injured knee

In 1971, he arrived in the U.S.

Taught at resorts and spas before opening his

first studio in Los Angeles

Bikram yoga classes instructed students in 26 asanas and two

breathing exercises


In 1979, Bikram obtained his first copyright, for his

book Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class

By 1984, admission to classes at his Beverly Hills studio

cost $20 per person, a 10-class package cost $100, and the

studio was taking in roughly $1,000 a day

In 1994, Bikram began to offer an intensive teacher-training course,

which led to a rise in the number of Bikram studios



By 2000, Bikram’s accelerated training program was

turning out about 200 teachers a year

By April 2003, Bikram had more than 700 studios in 220 countries

By 2011, some 5,000 Bikram Yoga studios had opened around the world


Controversies…..


In 2003, a collective of yoga teachers, Open Source Yoga

Unity (OSYU), based in San Francisco, California, filed suit

against Bikram, claiming that his copyrights and patents

were invalid, and that yoga could not be copyrighted

“Our belief is that you can’t treat

the poses as private property”

- OSYU’s copyright attorney


In 2006, the Indian government responded to Bikram’s

yoga patents by putting together a task force—a panel

of 100 historians and scientists that would catalog 1,500

yoga poses found in ancient Sanskrit, Urdu, and Persian

Tara Stiles

Founder of the ‘Strala Yoga’

Ballet Dancer,Professional Yoga Practitioner


Born in 1981 and grew up in rural Illinois

As a preteen, she discovered meditation

In 2006, she went on several fashion shoots that involved yoga apparel, and the

Ford Agency asked her to create and post promotional yoga videos on YouTube



In 2007, Stiles left Ford

Began to use Facebook to promote the yoga classes she

taught out of her apartment, and offered private sessions

Women’s Health and the Huffington Post hired her as a blogger


In 2008, Stiles opened her own studio, Strala Yoga

In 2010, Chopra and Stiles also released a yoga iPad app, “Authentic Yoga,” and

collaborated on a video


At the end of 2010, workout maven Jane Fonda reintroduced her fitness brand and

debuted “Team Fonda,” a group of fitness instructors with whom she launched new

workout videos, including Stiles

Stiles’s book, Slim Calm Sexy Yoga, was published in the summer of 2010

and was the number-one yoga book on Amazon.com for several months


“I mean, Bikram doesn’t want people

using his name without his certification,

which I get. I think you can have a name

of a studio, but it’s what goes on inside

that really matters. People always ask

what style I teach, and I’m like, it’s yoga”

The Hindu American Foundation

(HAF)

The Hindu Advocacy Group in America


In 2008, several members examined editions of Yoga Journal, which had become a popular American yoga magazine

They saw no reference to Hinduism in the magazine and concluded that it associated

Buddhism, Jainism, and Christianity with yoga more than it did Hinduism


“It was as if the Yoga Journal, as well as much of the

$6 billion U.S. yoga industry, had agreed to some sort

of unwritten covenant to use code words rather than

what they deemed the unmarketable ‘H-word,’”

- Suhag Shukla (the group’s managing director)


Shukla wrote a letter to the editor of Yoga Journal and followed it with a

phone call and there was no response

HAF decided to launch “Take Back Yoga—Bringing to Light Yoga’s Hindu Roots”

As a result,


“It’s not about branding, but about

acknowledgment. . . . It’s about

understanding that yoga is but one of

Hinduism’s great contributions to humanity”

- Shukla


On April 18, 2010, Aseem Shukla, a member of HAF’s

board, wrote a piece for the Washington Post’s On

Faith column, entitled, “The Theft of Yoga”

A few days later, Chopra responded and said yoga

did not originate in Hinduism


In November 2010, the New York Times ran an

article on the front page of its Sunday edition

about HAF’s “Take Back Yoga” campaign and

the ongoing debate over the origins of yoga


In March 2011, Sheetal Shah of HAF, Tara Stiles, Dr. Edwin Bryant of

Rutgers University, Dr. Virginia Cowen of the City University of New

York, and Edwin Stern, founder of Ashtanga Yoga NY, participated in a

discussion at Princeton University called “The Politics of Yoga”


“What we noticed . . . was that . . . while

[Western yogis] are very accepting of the fact

that yoga is rooted in ancient India, there was a

tension with calling it Hindu, or even accepting

the fact that it was rooted in Hindu philosophy

- Shah



R E F E R E N C E S

Photoswww.google.com

Branding Yoga, Harvard Case Study,

Rohit Deshpande, Kerry Herman and Anelena Lobbhttp://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6923.html

http://www.google.com/

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6923.html


Disclaimer

These slides were created by

Rahul Ranjan Kumar, as part of an

internship done under the guidance

of Prof. Sameer Mathur

(www.IIMInternship.com)"

branding yoga case analysis

Marketing