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
Photos
www.google.com
Branding Yoga, Harvard Case Study,
Rohit Deshpande, Kerry Herman and Anelena Lobb
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

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