Tech Mahindra’s Perigord adds design know-how for a holistic brand experience

The Situation: Companies seeking to differentiate their brand must take a holistic view to align and enable great physical + digital experiences. Tech Mahindra is trying to integrate technology, design, and process capabilities to help clients develop quick-to-market experiences that generate loyalty and brand affinity, requiring a wide breadth of talent and expertise. The bits and pieces that have come together at Tech Mahindra over the last several years, most recently with Perigord, add up to Tech Mahindra’s mission to help clients along their OneOffice journeys and beyond.

Tech Mahindra bought Perigord in 2021, the latest addition to its eclectic portfolio, which also includes BORN and Pininfarina. Perigord is a full-service branding and creative agency with more than 40 years of experience, primarily in healthcare and life sciences. The company helps design, manage, and deliver clients’ packaging, marcoms, and digital assets and assists with optimizing their digital supply chains. Perigord’s unique capability is its packaging design expertise, which it describes as “bringing the product to life on the shelf.” While its niche has been healthcare and life sciences, its capabilities are applicable well beyond these industries, particularly in retail and consumer packaged goods, where the design firm is making major headway. This acquisition is yet another move by Tech Mahindra to create an end-to-end experience capability for customers.

Perigord + Tech Mahindra helps CPG and other firms move faster for competitive advantage

Since its BORN acquisition, Tech Mahindra has outlined an end-to-end journey of customer experience encompassing the moment a customer is attracted to a product or company, their interactions with the product or company, and when they might choose to give feedback about that product or company. Perigord is just the latest asset that Tech Mahindra hopes will help it fulfill this cycle more completely. Tech Mahindra + Perigord’s technology-driven approach creates an environment where it is much easier and quicker to react to change. Perigord can test product designs with consumers to see if it resonates and change them within seconds. This speed to market is critical for brands eager to differentiate.

An element beyond design talent and capability that is critical for speedy execution is the regulatory and quality expertise Perigord’s expert team brings. It stays informed on different countries’ and regions’ protocols and rules for what must be printed on labels; for example, allergy warning requirements in the US are stringent. While it’s not what you’d think of as an “experience” factor, enabling speed to market by localized regulations is critical to get right.

Blending physical + digital experiences for a holistic brand experience

While one of Perigord’s key missions is to create “beautiful designs that win customers,” the real focus when paired with Tech Mahindra’s other design, technology, and business process services (BPS) capabilities is finding customer value in the beautiful design. For Perigord’s advanced packaging design capability, this means creating a look and feel that resonates with the consumer and results in a commercial uplift in a product, often to the tune of 10%­–15%. The quality of the product will make the customer purchase again, but the experience with the product and its design is critical to its experience with the brand. Now that consumers live in a world blending physical and digital, it is necessary to cultivate a holistic experience for a consumer’s relationship with physical products, where Perigord’s design is an influence, and its website and e-commerce touchpoints, where BORN can develop the look, feel, and functionality.

The Bottom Line: There’s a method to the madness of Tech Mahindra’s motley crew of acquisitions – but customers must bridge their gaps to create maximum value.

Tech Mahindra is on a path to bring design, technology, and business process services together to create an end-to-end solution for clients. With BORN handling design experience, targeting CMOs and chief experience officers, and creating experiential storyboards and digital experiences, Perigord adds art and packaging design for physical products, an essential element for many brands across industries. Tech Mahindra’s bread-and-butter BPS and technology services are the enablers and support capabilities, but client companies must break down their siloes to take advantage of these capabilities. Doing so is part of a greater journey to create an enterprise roadmap to align customer, employee, and partner experiences—the holistic viewpoint that goes beyond the OneOffice within the enterprise and extends to key stakeholders across the enterprise ecosystem.