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.

On Great Branding Ideas...

Taking the discussion on corporate brands and their communication solution further I want to talk about the notion of the Branding Idea. Stephen King mentioned it first but I haven't seen much understanding of this concept beyond that. When the brand is the corporation, it needs more than advertising, a visual metaphor that can not only go across a host of media vehicles but also captures the identity of the organization in a well understood metaphor. Probably the ML Bull and the Singapore girl are the best recognized examples of such an approach, not to forget our very own Maharaja. They all capture the personality of a service brand and serve as a guideline for all frontline staff.

However a lesser known concept of a branding idea is one where the proposition or the promise of the brand is captured in a metaphor. I have been fortunate to work on two such exercises for not-for-profits and although i cannot share the specifics of strategy, the Janaagraha idea captures the idea of participatory democracy while the VoteIndia idea is about political reforms. I see the LeadIndia logo drawing heavily from this idea that was developed by my creative colleagues about 3 years ago.

And to round it off here is another highly successful example of a branding idea that focuses more on the promise than the personality of the brand i.e. BPCL's Pure for Sure. It is an area of personal passion for me so you will see much more on the subject of branding ideas. Treat this one as a bit of a primer.

The Rajeev Cluster!

Icons are defined as ideas that are a symbol of their times and 'Iconic Brands' as well perform the same role in our consumption driven society. It probably requires the benefit of hindsight to distinguish the real icons of an era and doing it for the recent past is always tricky given how much of the real substance of certain brands is really drenched in hype...when every second brand is claiming to be the spirit of new India, which ones will realy be remembered 20 years from now remains to be seen

Here is taking a shot at a few icons from the 1980s- I think the central event of the decade was the coming to power of Rajeev Gandhi, who despite all his flaws brought a refreshingly modern world-view to India and for a couple of years we were all enrolled in it till he lapsed back into the politics of the past...i think at his best he represented youth, progressiveness, professionalism, a world-class standard of doing things and by being that repositioned the past (mostly to do with his mother and her coterie) as regressive, feudal and dated. And riding on that spirit were three brands which did exactly the same repositioning to the respective incumbents in those categories. The icons for the 80s in my opinion would be Maruti, Hero Honda and Titan - b rands that actually did a Rajeev Gandhi on Ambassador, Bajaj Sccoters and HMT. Only Bajaj, of the incumbents, has been able to reinvent itself and among the icons Titan has probably lost a lot of its iconic appeal by continuing to did deeper into a category fast losing its relevance. If one were to conjecture on the iconic brands of the 1990s, what would they be?

Any guesses?

A Brand Ambassador called NRN

In an earlier post on Infosys i had mentioned how the leadership in the last few years has not shown an understanding of the Infy difference the way NRN used to. They have been extremely competent business managers delivering great results but no different from the guys at TCS or Wipro or Cognizant... Last evening, after a long time, saw NRN in action on CNBC and he spoke about the rupee appreciation in a manner only he can. Despite IT companies losing millions of dollars, he defended the appreciation of the rupee as a sign of the strengthening of the Indian economy and how our imports will become cheaper and therefore the overall good it represents for the country. This is what separates him from the rest- whether it is taking a stand on the IIM quota issue, or suggesting that IT companies should be taxed by governement or questioning intentions of ex-prime ministers... he has always taken a clear stand and operated from a place of conviction rather than convenience.

And that has been the Infy difference- not in terms of business model or culture as much as the ideology that it represented. Coming from the middle class background, NRN somehow showed the opportunistic middle class how not be emasculated and be a stand for a few things irrespective of the stakes involved....

Dying to see some of that spunk in the current leadership as well!

A 'release' rather than a 'launch'!

Trying to conjecture on what is behind this iPhone frenzy and what does it say about the future of marketing/promotion?

My feeling is that in categories with very high rate of innovation, the template for marketing increasingly follows that of film promotions, where you maximize returns in a short span through a sensational build-up of curiosity. Mr. Jobs introduced the trailer to iPhone 6 months back and since then with selective dissemination of information/rumor/trivia etc. the audience has been kept sufficiently appetized. Now, the off-take needs to be maximized before a Nokia or a Motorola introduces the next great thing in mobiles and therefore all the hype and the mega-event of the release.

Incidentally, films are also seeing an interesting phenomenon. A recent Economist study shows how the highest grosser these days are grossing much higher amounts in much shorter time compared to say 8-10 years ago. People do not remember the movie 3 years down the line but consistently the record for gross collection is getting broken in successive years.

According to Shekhar Kapur, the day is not far when a movie will be launched as an event on the net - say Steven Spielberg's next big movie will be available for a download between 12am and 3am on XYZ date against a payment of K dollars- which will reduce the distribution cost to zero, eliminate any loss due to piracy etc. and curiosity of the early adopter will ensure that people across the globe will get online and download it.

With the explosion of creativity in category after category, this phenomena is only going to get accentuated as a brand's ability to be the in-thing is only as long or short as the launch of the next innovation. And personal gadgets (Faith Popcorn calls them 'accessible luxury'), in particular, have become central definers of personal identity leading people to heightened levels of desperation to acquire them to live up to their self image of being with-it!

Brand Buildup!

The frenzy around the recent launches of the iPhone and Harry Potter book provide exciting ossibilities for brands. Personally, at one level, i cannot fathom what makes people queue up three days in advance to buy their piece of the phone or the book, but to each his own. I've queued up outside my son's school at 4am to get the admission form, waited in a stampedesque queue for 4 hours at Tirupati...

However, both iPhone and Harry Potter are aimed at the elite and if people at that level in the society can put themselves through so much to get their hands on the brand, it says something about the sources of personal identity.

It completely alters the hierarchy in the consumer-brand relationship--as marketers we are trained to earn our consumers but when the consumer has to earn the brand, one can only gape at the power of these ingenious marketers!