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…