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.