A home for your hobbies

A well executed service concept can be a great inspiration and Pidilite Hobby Ideas is one such. Recently walked into one their outlets (Bangalore) and besides the amazing range of goodies that Pidilite has put together from across the world, one is struck by the overall service experience.
Hobby ideas is an upstream stationery shop which caters to a host of pastime pursuits – from the regular like painting, sketching etc. to more exotic ones like clay modelling, wood modelling etc. Besides it has accessories that enable even novices like me to produce something which is aesthetically acceptable. There are dye-cuts, punches, glitters, origami papers, and all sorts of things which can take even a simple greeting card to a new level of accomplishment.
It is all put together with enormous care and attention and the excitement one feels is similar to the one in a toyshop for a child!
Moreover, what really caught my imagination is the way they are going about marketing themselves. One can attend a free workshop every evening for 3 hours with a highly skilled Pidilite person and produce a hobby idea (which are all displayed in the store), and they also have a service where one can organize a birthday in a part of the store with a customized workshop where the stuff that the guests produce can be taken home as the return gift. In December they are launching a series of weekly workshops aimed at homemakers and children.
It is this kind of experiential marketing that creates a high degree of loyalty in customers. Pidilite have not gone for a high profile media blitz or an invitation sale, instead they have opted for a more difficult, slow burn path to create a small but dedicated base of customers who have experienced the joy of producing a hobby.
And we all know that it is not so easy for a highly product oriented company to pull something like this off in the service domain.
Have always admired this little gem of a company out of Mumbai for its innovative ways but we will leave that for another post.

Bharti’s New Identity

Because this blog’s central focus is on brand building for ‘organization brands’, every time a significant corporate brand undergoes a facelift, I am tempted to add my two bits.

The Bharti Group being the latest one to go in for a new garb.
Frankly, more often than not I have felt that the visual identity changes tend to be taken up without any real change on the ground. In fact, one gets the sense that it is often to create a sense of activity in the absence of any real change on the ground.

However, in the case of Bharti, clearly the organization had transformed way beyond what its earlier identity reminded stakeholders of. There was a clearly a case of underlining that change and getting all the diversified forays of the group underlined in public memory. Having built a hugely successful core business in telephony, the group has also attracted the likes of Wal Mart and Axa to partner with it.
The new logo makes no attempt to maintain continuity with the past, indicative if the trajectory the group’s growth has followed. It is a striking new font in a color that one doesn’t see very often and the subtle idea in the perpendicular arrow-heads is well integrated into the unit.
Having said that, one also wonders whether the group missed out on an opportunity to make the idea work a little harder.
Fundamentally, the new identity, with all its attempts at taking the high ground, fails to capture the uniqueness of the Bharti personality. Part of the reason being the lack of idiosyncrasy in the Bharti group itself. They try very hard to portray a good, responsible big boy image and model themselves on the Sri Rama Archetype much like TATA or Infosys does.
Even the advertising around the new idea is as motherhood as one can get with the core message of ‘small steps resulting in something big’ and using metaphors like Gandhi etc. is nothing but a lazy attempt at creativity, with neither much upside nor much downside (when Apple did 'the crazy ones' more than a decade ago it was an idea and they could pull it off, but subsequently many have tried to ride on it without it really sticking to them). The full page ad Bharti did about a week back, could have belonged to a dozen other success stories of the last decade.
The TV commercial looks more like an a/v one would do for an internal sales meet to kick it off on a high.

Instead a closer to reality story probably would have worked much better.
There is a certain endearing humility to Mr. Sunil Mittal, which is a quality the group may do well to capture. Also, it has more Indian-ness than an Infy or a TATA, reflected in its North Indian roots and its ‘band of brothers’ management structure. In a way this makes the group more earthy, accessible and charming. They seem to be in denial of their rough edges and in the process miss out on the spunk.
It is a Dhoni compared to the Dravid/Kumbles, that it tries to walk in the footsteps of.
This cultural uniqueness of this group, along with its stellar business success could have given the communication that edge that it currently sorely lacks.

Jaagore Ideas!

Have been privileged to be associated with TATA Tea's initiative onebillionvoters in collaboration with Janaagraha. A simple idea of getting youth to register as voters. The idea is simple and backed by two inspiring parent brands...looks like a winner from the start.
But to me the bigger story is the team behind it. A bunch of youngsters, all in their 20s, most of them from an IIT/IIM pedigree have takes off from their well paying careers and within a span of a few months put together an exceptional backend to make this happen.
From a marketing perspective, it is a commendable effort by TATA Tea to introduce substance into the jaagore idea and give it a bite.
Very TATA if you care for my opinion. It is this brand's ability to walk more than talk on this front that makes it such an icon among brands.
There has been similar opportunity available for other brands as well. Of the current lot Idea cellular could do well to take its thought of eradicating illiteracy through mobile phones forward. I would have liked if Perter Emgland also could have taken the 'Honest Shirt' idea into a more action oriented territory to keep it fresh.

Kudos for KILB

AEGON-Religare's KILB campaign is a wonderful usurping of a generic benefit of insurance i.e. risk protection, that has been lying unclaimed for many years now. I was fortunate to do a little bit of work almost 6 years ago on the category and at that time only Max New York Life was talking this language. I still remember the first question their advisor asked me- If you die today, how much money does your family need to survive. All others kept asking- What is your budget for premium payment?

India, thanks to LIC, has historically looked at insurance as an investment tool rather than a risk protection one. And as the MNYL advisor mentioned very vividly during my meeting 6 years ago- Sir, selling insurance as risk protection in India is a bit like whitewater rafting- it is very exciting but you are also going against the tide?

Hopefully KILB will do the job of reorienting the whole sector towards its core value proposition.

DNA of a Newspaper Launch

Off late Bangalore has been plastered with gigantic hoardings announcing the arrival of DNA, the newspaper initiative of the ZEE-Bhaskar combine. The campaign, which had an elaborate teaser phase, is now carrying ads which are supposedly insider’s take on what makes Bangalore a place to be proud of. There are references to cult eateries like Koshy’s, lots of software lingo etc. to mention a few. As someone who considers oneself to be a bit of a media-vore, the campaign, although eye catching, leaves me cold. The primary reason being that as an insider in the advertising/media fraternity, it is so templatized a launch, that one can see right through the kind of conventional thinking that has gone into it. In today’s times one is so inundated with exciting creative stuff all the time, particularly on the net, that this piece of work is just too passé. I can recall at least 5 such city launches of big brands across media and telecom space which have tried this hackneyed approach of trying to connect to a city’s culture.
Douglas Holt, whose book How Brand Become Icons, talks about brands that become a part of the cultural landscape and to me that is what a media brand strives for in the long run. He distinguishes three kinds of audiences- the insiders, who may not consume the brand but their nod of approval is necessary for a brand to get accepted, the followers, those who form the core consumption base of the brand and the feeders- who just emulate the opinion leading followers.
For DNA in Bangalore, the insiders are people in the media, advertising, journalism, theatre space i.e. the kind of crowd that populates a place like Koshy’s. While they may not buy DNA as they source their information and opinions from the net and the blogosphere, they feeling acknowledged and understood is critical for a Bangalore brand to be treated as an insider. To me this campaign, with its superficial understanding of the city, just doesn’t cut it with this audience.
Ideally this campaign should have focused on the core anxiety of the Bangalorean which is around the loss of innocence of the city in the pursuit of modernity and material prosperity. If DNA has presented an understanding of how Bangalore can make a role model for a dramatic reconciliation of the value of Openness, while simultaneously maintaining rock solid rootedness in some timeless values, my hunch is that DNA could have shown an understanding of the DNA of this city.

Positioning India

Have been a big fan of Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India and frankly, haven't come across a piece of writing that packs so much punch in as few as 200 pages. The book tries to get to the roots of how the Indian identity got created and deeply established in less than a century. If, about a hundred years ago one had asked any one living on the subcontinent who they were, no one probably would have played back 'being Indian' as one of the descriptors. Moreover, in the absence of a clearly defined geographical entity it was something that first needed articulation as there was no common Idea of India that everyone could relate to. The book explores how the Indian leadership, which was seeking freedom, had to first explore and articulate what the concept of India was. Nehru, Gandhi, Tagore, Savarkar etc. went in their own personal quests from various perspectives and eventually Nehru's vision prevailed over others and he even got the opportunity to orchestrate the post-independence India's initiatives to internally infuse the Indian identity on its citizens as well as position India on the global landscape.

Where Tagore reworked the poetic language and Gandhi turned to religious traditions to make their Indian selves, Nehru discovered India through the medium of history. temperamentally he saw the world historically; a perspective that at once defined his sense of political possibility and made him vigilant about attending to how the future would look back on his own actions.

As a student of Organization Brands, this book particularly interests me as a parallel for positioning a complex entity (like a Corporation)in a competitive scenario. In this case it happens to be even more challenging as the entity is marginal in terms of resources, is extremely heterogeneous and complex and exists more as a spirit rather than a well-defined geographical space.

Here is an excerpt from the book which captures the external challenge Nehru had to deal with--

Indianness was constituted out of internal diversity, but in Nehru's vision it was equally an international identity, a way of being in the wider world. In contrast to the sometimes narrowly domestic horizons of most in the nationalist movement, Nehru understood independence as an opportunity to establish India as a presence on the world stage. The international profile of states depended on their economic and military prowess, and India obviously could not make its mark in these domains. A new state like India, weak by international standards, would have to pursue its interests by creating its own opportunities and chances. By speaking the language of morality and justice, it might just be able to surprise and unbalance the more powerful, extracting concessions from their sheer embarrassment. Nehru, in this the follower of Gandhi, turned around the language of victim hood: instead of portraying India as a martyr to colonial subjection which had to turn inwards to find and repair itself, he affirmed India's character as a self confident actor in international politics.

MAD AND DEVINE by SUDHIR KAKAR

Just picked up Dr. Kakar’s latest titled Mad and Devine-Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World and am riveted by it. The book looks at the interplay between the spirit and the psyche and aims at distinguishing between the psychic and the spiritual phenomena. Besides insightfully articulating something as abstract as that, his brilliance lies in the ability to infuse poetry into the subject matter. I have been a keen student and follower of Dr. Kakar’s work and it is great to see him get back to non-fiction after a series of novels in the last 10 years. Although last year he came out with The Indians-Portrait of a People, but it was more a synopsized version of his earlier works. Check M&D out for a breathtaking journey into the inner theatre of the mind!

Distinguishing Infy!

My obsession with Infosys continues :-)...for years i have been informally asking people in the IT industry on what they feel are the real differentiators between the Big Three of Indian IT- TCS, Infy and Wipro...and everyone has their take on it. There are those who believe that TCS scores with its years of domain knowledge and Infy is good at customer relations, Wipro has strong R&D and pricing advantage, there are those who say that TCS has character (a euphemism for being a bit boring and dowdy) while Infy has charisma and personality...Wipro just copies what Infy does etc. Some say Infy is strong on processes while TCS has technical expertise.

And there are those whose technical mastery gives them the ability to find differences in a much more nuanced technical platform kind of way...Infy is strong on Java 3.3 and Wipro has competencies in Web 2.020...just kidding!

However, to my mind inspite of similar business models and the remarkably similar jargon they themselves use to describe their differences (a la Global Delivery Model and end-to-end solutions)...Infosys really stands out as a brand. It enjoys greater coherence and uniqueness as an entity and it shows up in its performance i.e. profitability.

It in fact occurs as being more 'New Economy'compared to both TCS and Wipro which despite being in the same sector look a bit more orthodox, conservative and conventional.

The central value which Infy has and its comparative companies lack in my opinion is the cultural aspect of OPENNESS- it is on the whole a more imaginative and creative conception than the other two brands.And this value shines through in all its aspects of managing itself- the transparency in reporting, the generosity in sharing wealth, in providing outstanding facilities, in not being afraid to take stands on socially relevant issues...

Infy is an icon of the post liberalization India and as a student of brands in general and company brands in particular it keeps on mesmerizing me with its various nuances....

Actions do speak louder than words in the brand world...

Gareth Kay writes about Brand Defining Gestures on his blog and the idea that brands need to go beyond the so called 'communications' or 'marketing' and provide a proof of what they are committed to. A similar thought has been building up in my mind since i first read about 'signature policies' as a brand building tool for service brands in Stephen King's classic Brand Building in the 1990s. Increasingly companies that pit their money where there mouth is and use actions to communicate their commitment rather than words will get to be 'brands' ahead of others. To that extent some of the most iconic companies have used signature events to strengthen their equity- Apple and MacWorld, Infosys and its quarterly results (not off late though) etc.
The first step, in my opinion to think up an action would be to get in touch with the core purpose i.e. the sense of contribution that genuinely drives the management to work. And from there any large hearted, imagination capturing experience that suggests itself would be a great place to start. Recently Starbucks' decision to shut down all its outlets for 3 hours to get beck in touch with its roots or Intel management's walking out and reentering the premises as if a new management had taken over under Andy Grove are inspiring stories of using a difficult moment in the brand's history to reinforce its core value.

Method in madness...

This one seems to be taking a life of its own. Continuing in the spirit of my previous post about innocent drinks and help remedies, here is another cute, soulful, passionate and transparent FMCG firm called method -, into household cleaning stuff. According to their website, they are the fastest growing FMCG company in the US and their mission is to give face lift to the household cleaning industry.

And alongside is a remarkable post from Piers Fawkes at PSFK on the future of large FMCG a la P&G, Unilever etc.

More and more consumers appear to be attracted to ‘real’ brands - brands with soul, history and substance - brands like Innocent Drinks or Method soap. These brands live because they reflect the values of the management and staff and the transparency generated by the web helps fuel the love of them.

Company brand building is here to stay and the habit purchase FMCG is the last frontier that is at least beginning to get seriously repositioned by the entry of these maverick firms....

A couple of charming little gems...

Talking of company branding in the FMCG space, Gareth Kay has introduced me to two little gems- a health drink company called innocent out of UK and Help Remedies, a company into the making of health products like headache pills and bandages (as of now).
Both strikingly authentic, accessible and cute...check them out for a unique brand personality that seems to indicate to the kind of values the new economy versions of old established categories are veering towards.

A Remarkable Turnaround!

Not sure if its just me, but Simplifly Deccan (formerly Deccan Aviation) seems to have pulled off a miraculous turnaround in its service quality in just a few months of Mr. Mallya taking over. The last two times i have travelled, the service quality experience has been outstanding. Right from adhering to time, to keeping travllers informed, to providing water, newspaper and magazine (not the In-flight stuff but a Businessworld).
Even when makemytrip.com goofed up with my bookings and charged me 4 times for the same ticket, the lady at the counter spent nearly half an hour running from one counter to another to get it resolved. Finally she got me the call centre number, explained what had happened and who needed to be communicated and stood by my side throughout the phonecall to make sure that it was resolved.
The confidence in the body language of the staff is something to be seen. And all this has been done without tampering with the pricing which continues to be very attractive.
Great case for demonstrating that it doesnt take money to deliver great service!
Kudos to the guys at Kingfisher!

The Mother of all Logistics...

Happened to study a little bit about the logistics business in the context of a new business lead over the weekend. The logistics of logistics are quite overwhelming- eg. UPS, which has developed a new strategy for reinventing its brand for the future will take 6 years just for the visual identity change to take place because it involves 88,000 vehicles, hundreds of airplanes, over a million uniforms and nearly 2000 locations/facilities. Fedex saved millions of dollars in printing/painting cost when it shortened its name for Federal Express. Here is an interesting speech by the marketing head of UPS to announce the context of the band revamp. It explains in fairly simple terms the complexity of examining and nurturing an organization brand.

The Summer Collection...

The recent spate of rebranding initiatives clearly indicates the state of mind of a lot of managements in the country. Brand is high on priority but low on understanding. However there is some interesting work some not so great.
On the whole, here is what I felt of the 3 that I have noticed.
Shoppers is a pretty neat job of making the retailer future ready. The new logo has all the understated class and cosmopolitan feel of the brand while keeping it very accessible. The line- Start Something New – really is awful. Not only is it copied, it is so passé that it undoes some of the ground covered by the logo.
As Luke Sullivan says in Hey Whipple Squeeze This- If you don’t have a ‘just do it’, just don’t!
Godrej, I feel has gone a few decades back and somewhere the confused identity is leaping out. The new logo looks terribly inspired by Google and that is certainly a little too much for Godrej to replicate. However, it is pretty clear that Interbrand has not developed a strong sense of what Godrej has meant over the decades to Indians and left a lot of money on the table in terms of leveraging the equity of the group. The treatment of the new logo is terribly out of character with the group’s overall enduring, dignified and classy appeal.
I feel strongly about Ceat though. I feel it has shot itself in the foot by taking the rhino out. Metaphors like these are hard to come by. A gattu (Asian Paints), a Maharaja etc. have been few and far between and one wonders what kind of managements are not gotten by a great idea when they see one. In an earlier post I had written about the power of a Branding Idea.
To me Ceat getting rid of the rhino is a form of hara-kiri as other than that logo I can’t think of anything distinctive the company had going for itself for a while. The new logo is another one of those idealess logos where reams of longwinded explanation will be provided about every color, every nuance and every brushstroke that has gone into that logo but ask the consumer to interpret it and not even 1% of that will be played back.

What's in a Name!

The amount of agonizing I usually see over naming issues in companies makes me wonder if it is all worth it. Just to qualify, I have nothing against a truckload of creativity in naming a company ( a la innocent, Apple etc.) but when I see massive amount of management time being spent on commoditized businesses running under absolutely bland family names I wonder What’s really in a name?
Recently came across a client dilemma. An industrial business (B2B) has been operating under a certain name (a generic English word) across a few geographies. Now it wants to enter a new geography where some other business with the same name has already been in existence. The question is whether to go ahead with the same name and spend our money and imagination to establish our version of the same name more distinctively than the other or to choose a new, distinctive one. One would want to analyze the situation from various angles like the existing equity in their name, any regulatory hurdles etc. and not to mention some possible superstitions of the management.
However the question on my mind remains if we are grappling with the real stuff or just the cosmetics? And is it worth the time and money being spent on such exercises?
(Incidentally just came across a blog dedicated to the issue of naming - Namewire is an interesting blog which covers this topic from various perspectives and provides a lot of material to mull over).
In Indian we have had a remarkable marketing story unfolding over the last decade or so in the form of what is known today as Vodaphone. It has gone from starting out as Max-Touch to being Orange and then till a few months ago Hutch. Every time it has managed to transition to a new name absolutely effortlessly keeping the same core values and brand personality intact. Although it may sound a little too premature, there are two Reliances operating and carving out fairly distinct personalities for themselves. On the flip side there are the expensive but superficial rebranding/revamping exercises a la Shoppers Stop, Ceat, Berger, Godrej etc. that we have witnessed in recent times.
The point I am making here is that very few clients seem to be engaging with the real issue of brand personality which is where the brand gets built or destroyed and not in naming/visual identity. Only when a senior management is in touch with its organizational personality it can cause uniqueness to happen in the market and name in may opinion plays an insignificant role in it. Sadly, in my opinion very few pass that test and end up looking for answers in the wrong places like visual identity (a highly overrated domain in my opinion , but will leave that one for another day).
I have been a part of an absolutely brilliant naming exercise for a not-for-profit called Janaagraha where we identified what the movement needs to stand for and the name consciously evoked a certain proposition and personality of Gandhi.
On the other hand, my own firm which is called Centre of Gravity (not yet a brand by any stretch of imagination) has been a total positive coincidence. What is our firm today was started by a colleague who was into climbing/adventure sports and the name Centre of Gravity sounded apt for that. Due to a host of serendipities the team ended up doing brand strategy work for a few clients and eventually decided to focus on pure Organization Brands and when we looked at the name it sounded perfectly apt and incredibly creative since our work is primarily about helping organizations define the core of their being their identity i.e. their Centre of Gravity.
So, while we agonize over naming our rose- the starting point would be to get in touch with its smell…

How it all started for me…

One of the peculiar aspects of my life is that if any of my parents, in-laws or close relatives is asked what I do for a living, you will get as many answers as there are people. At best, the commonality in their answers would be that it’s got something to do with advertising. Advertising itself would have been an unusual choice for them but within that broad realm when I carved out a space called Organizatio Brand Consulting, the specialization is probably too much to comprehend.
I just thought I will retrace back on how these choices got made and I happened to show up in this domain.
During my engineering days (which is normally what above average students in small towns end up doing) it became increasingly clear that I wasn’t up to it. It just did not excite me and today I cannot recall a single concept of electrical engineering that I spent 4 years doing. Incidentally, I graduated with 78% marks which says something about the way that system works.
However, I was one of those who really enjoyed taking part in most of the creative endeavors like theatre, singing, organizing events etc. And somewhere it all added up for me into the seductive world of showbiz. But that looked too much of a wild west from the safe traditional environs of Bhopal so I chose a reasonable middle ground of advertising- reasonably creative and adequately organized as a career option.
Someone mentioned MICA (Mudra Institute of Communications) and besides the IIMs, that was the only institute I applied to as a part of my post grad pursuits. Would probably have ended up in IT if that had not come through as I had a offer from TCS as a part of my campus placement. I really enjoyed the MICA entrance test which tapped into all my jack-of-all-trades creative capability.
Expecting a course in ad-making I land up at MICA and discover that there is something called client servicing and media planning and market research… but strangely nothing to do with actual making of advertising. Anyway, the fees was paid, and a job in an agency was assured so one had no option but to persist. Fortunately, I landed up with a really inspiring bunch of friends, all immensely creatively gifted and in an indirect sort of way one got the experience one was seeking. We all dreamt of starting our own agency together which would reinvent the profession and hopefully do a Bernbach-II.
In my summer placements I was exposed to an actual ad- agency and saw its inner workings. I was quite disappointed with what I saw of servicing, which I was veering towards as a year two specialization before the summers. Once back on campus, market research looked a better option and having had enough of the left brained stuff in my engineering, was clear that qualitative, and not quantitative research, would give me both status and joy.
Then a two day session conducted by Santosh Desai altered the course of my life. I still remember that workshop called – Nailing the Monster- Insightful Strategy Made Easy. And two days and many Hoffstedes (a model used by Santosh based on Geert Hoffstede’s work on mapping organizational cultures) later I knew that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Not the Hoffstedes, but Account Planning!
It was a mesmerizing two days which took us into the world of Hindi movies, music, popular culture, social psychology, anthropology and everything that makes life worth living. I broke-off from my reclusive backbencher past for the first time and participated like crazy in every discussion bringing my own life into it.
Subsequently, we had another day long session with Rahul Kansal (ex-Mudra and now ToI) and it took the subject matter a few steps further. I hit it off personally with Rahul and he offered me the opportunity to work with him post graduating, which I grabbed with both hands. That first year at Mudra was great fun- working closely with Rahul on a lot of new business work and exposure to a new category every fortnight. I was extremely fortunate to have a peek into the CEO’s world right from the start and the opportunity to look at many businesses strategically. I think that exposure had the most profound impact on my orientation towards turning a full fledged consultant rather than an in-house strategic planning person.
Due to a set of circumstances to do with life in Mumbai, I moved to Bangalore and joined Orchard Advertising hoping to further my account planning exposure but things never took off the way I had hoped. There was always a sense of not understanding what strategic account planning was really about besides writing good power-points and better-than-others creative briefs. I was actually considering giving up hopes of doing account planning the way it looked in those class romm sessions at MICA and move into either the client side or quail research.
But again through some strange coincidences , my quest for a guru in this field took me to the doorstep of Momentum, a firm founded by Dharen Chadha a few years back after quitting at one of the Global Planning Directors of JWT…and this where I found my bliss!
More on that in another post, but the moral of this story being that while there was no intentional plan to be here, it was no series of happy accidents either. I was lucky to have discovered broadly what I wanted to do in my B-school itself and got exposed to practitioners of highest caliber and integrity. But in the absence of a conventional well-designed training/exposure, one had to go through some trial and error to make this ambition workable.
I do wonder though if that Santosh Desai session had not happened, what course life might have taken...

Additional Perspectives on Measuring Reputational Capital...

In an interesting coincidence, discovered this blogpost by David Hensley which also talks about the challenges in measuring reputation and brings the dimension of risk management to it. The other perspective i found interesting is how parts of the brand management responsibility of a corporate brand gets split across CSR, Corp Comm and investor relations. Read on...

Managing..OOPS...MEASURING the Reputational Capital…

As a brand-building advisor one is always striving to tangible-ize the benefits that an organization can look forward through investment in understanding and strengthening their brand/s. And I was wondering about what would be keeping the CEOs of reasonably well-run organizations awake at night and conecting the benefits to those priorities.
It essentially came down to profits, revenues and increasingly, attrition.
And while great brands command not only great premiums, ever expanding sales and a higher loyalty of employees, it continues to be a important to have and but the how is pretty unclear to senior managements. There is a serious causal ambiguity about achieving this chimera called an 'Great Brand'.
I say this because I do not see them spending on reputation management the kind of time and resources that are spend on financial management as well as people management. Large corporations rarely have a marketing function and even if there is one it is usually ends up being an out-house managing corporate communication accountabilities.
So what explains this lack of involvement, why do marketing advisors not enjoy the same position as investment bankers and HR managers in front of the CEO.
I believe bulk of the responsibility lies with the lack of quantitative accountability within the marketing function. The primary function of marketing is to strengthen the reputation of the brand but comprehensive brand building takes time and results are felt only over a period of time and at times only under crisis when this intangible buffer of goodwill kicks in to provide the benefit of doubt in one’s favor.
While everything to do with finance and HR is measurable on a daily basis, the same cannot be said about the reputation.
In product brands it is still possible with the established tracking mechanisms available (although I have my reservations about their accuracy and objectives as well). Therefore, the brand management function enjoys the pride of place in such organizations. However, management of product brands has also become increasingly mechanical and the total lack of imagination has increasingly led to particularly the fmcg space losing its prominence.
But organization brands are far more complex and abstract. The current techniques of tracking them do not represent an adequate appreciation of their uniqueness and the standardized methodology just looks for things like recall which are not just inadequate but seriously misleading.
What is needed is an ongoing tracking, particularly with opinion leading constituencies like B-school students, financial analysts, media etc. which tracks a corporation for the primary unique values associated with it.
Goldman Sachs, on its website mentions the management of its finances , people and reputation as its foremost priority. And they are one of the most unique and admired company brands in the world. One wonders if these finance wizards know a trick or two about reputation measurement as well which we marketing types would have missed.

Mr. Strategy...

Michael Porter, talks about his personal journey as well as the importance of strategy in this long but riveting interview- www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV4sisINqYg"

Artificial Limits of Brand Extensions

Brand Extension has been one of the buzzing advisory space and as i read a neatly written post by Jennifer Rice on How far a Brand can Stretch, i was wondering if the limits we put to a brand are in any way real. I for one believe that every brand name can carry anything under it and it is only limited by its competence. There are no external limits to a brand in terms of consumer perceptions, which are absolutely and continuously capable of changing.
It may sound a little brash and provocative, so let me share where i am coming from. When i look at an Apple moving from category to category, or large conglomerate brands like the TATAs or a GE, i fail to see why a brand cannot cut across many unrelated categories.
My submission is that a brand extension assumes a certain easy-way-out by doing a me-to or a sub-optimal offering, which is aimed at purely riding on the strength of the existing equity of the brand built through the good work done in another category. It is actually a lazy marketer's answer to growth.
A brand really keen to enhance its reputation will focus on bringing something dramatically new to the new category and by doing that will not only succeed in the new initiative but also enhance the overall equity of the brand. Who would have suggested Apple expand into MP3 players?
After all, if brands are like humans, the argument can go towards their limitless potential in extending and expanding themselves. I have seen many individuals building successful reputations in more than one unrelated areas of life and being celebrated rather than questioned for it...
As the Company Brand paradigm takes hold, this question of what is the extendable limit of a brand is going to come under increasing pressure to prove itself innocent.

The anatomy of results- do Consultants deliver?

Was reading an extremely provocative discussion on David Maister's blog on the value consultants bring to the table. I have had violent debates with my colleagues on the extent to which we as consultants can take responsibility for client's result. I have always found it to be an extremely arrogant (if not salesman-like claim) when consultants claim of delivering results (as in growth, profitability etc.) without acknowledging the contribution from management or the circumstances. I am a little conservative on such promises and claims and usually come across as being defensive but i strongly believe that we consultants are limited by three barriers-

1. Blinded by our specialization- there is much more to an organization than what we are good at!
2. Limited by the vantage point- the CEO/COO vantage point is just not available to us to realize the many fine lines that they have to walk in managing the entire organization
3. Protected from hidden agendas and political pressures which are such an integral part of any organization.

Having said that, i do believe that we provide enormous value in creating a high level of understanding in an organisation which primarily comes from four factors-

1. Ability to singlemindedly focus on an issue- just a function of time.
2. Cross category knowledge which is able to see many different perspectives simultaneously compared to those who have spent a lifetime in a particular environment
3. Objectivity of an outsider.
4. A lifetime of experience in a domain (particularly applicable to niche areas like mine (brand strategy) where a lot of time and energy can get wasted by not seeing the broader context in which a brand is getting built.

I make it a conscious effort to cultivate a deep respect for the smallest entrepreneur or even a manager of a modestly sized team for what they are up to. I may see a lot amiss given how many organizations i study in the course of the work but nothing can take away the credit from a person pulling together a bunch of people to deliver value on an everyday basis, however small it may be.

So the context for a consultant in my opinion has to be one of a servant-leader whose interpretation/ findings/recommendations are more a stimuli to aid a management's self investigation, rather than truth about their organization.

...only one King!

To all those looking for some serious theoretical grounding in the abstract, subjective world of brands and communications, JWT has done a huge favor by coming out with the Timeless Works of Stephen King. I have been fortunate to have been exposed to his works by my mentor and we have been studying, not just reading the stuff he wrote during nearly three decades of practice at JWT. The prescience and the depth of the man is mind boggling. Particularly the articles on Brand Building in the 1990s and Strategic Development of Brands. In the latter, he talks about a new kind of brand planning organization that will be required to service clients in the future (article written in 1988) and almost every word resonates as having come true, including the need for expertise in one-to-one interactive marketing, even before the advent of the Internet.

This book needs to be treated like a pillow and flattened by every planner worth his salt.

It breaks down the world of brand-building practice into simple universally applicable elements that can guide decision making under almost any circumstance. And this grounding in my opinion, is key to ensuring that the world of brand strategy is taken as seriously by clients as the world of management consulting.