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.