Tag: brand building

  • The business of brand

    It used to be that a brand manager could run 3-4 campaigns a year, negotiate heavily in media buying for efficiency, and roughly correlate effectiveness to quarterly brand health data and sales performance. With VC funding-led rapid scaling, digitisation,  real-time data, and polarised social media, this version is being rendered obsolete. The changing business context also means that looking at a 30 sec ad purely through a consumer lens is only half the story. Two recent examples made me reflect on the dynamics between brand, social media, and business.  I do realise that my commenting on them is a bit like the Nobody – Me meme, and delayed at that, but that’s one of the perks of having a blog.

    Cred: We’ll begin with the Mad Men perspective, but after a short detour. Brand building for VC-funded startups has a template that actually works. Rational benefits with emotional storytelling. Flipkart and Myntra both went through a learning curve with “Granny and Mouse” and “Where fashion comes together” respectively, before they cracked it with “kids as adults” and “Real life mein aisa hota hai kya?“. It works because in addition to building the brand promise, it also has a tangible effect on business. And that’s why it’s often followed by many others across categories – Pepperfry, LivSpace, Khatabook, or even an extended approach like The Whole Truth. This is assuming that distribution, product, customer service etc are at least on par, and the execution is done well.  In that context, Cred’s recent ads, after readability issues in the first print ad, and the lengthy Jim Sarbh ad, were most definitely clutter-breaking. By not following that template.  (more…)

  • Brand – ego vs evolution

    In my previous post on brands, I had briefly touched upon the brand’s integrity of intent as an imperative to its success. I brought up two approaches to it – one based on self image and the other based on self actualisation. The first is a target, the second is exploration. While I was agnostic to the approach earlier, the book I am reading now – Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything – has given me a bias for the latter.

    This is why – evolution has been the longest running phenomenon ever, beating anything made by man quite easily. Because before there was mind, there was matter, whether it was perceived or not. That includes even the idea of God, which is probably the best brand ever built. Arguably, evolution’s success can be attributed to its having no end goal in mind. Can that work for a brand? (more…)

  • Has marketing left brand behind?

    A couple of months ago, I attended an event on brand building. The gentlemen who presented had a lot of experience between them – agency and client side, as well as across domains ranging from baby care to FMCG to jewelry to auto to e-commerce. The attendees were all from new economy companies. During his talk, one of them pointed out that though digital offered the capability to target an audience of one, brand communication was better done keeping in mind a larger base. To elaborate, while the product might work for many user personas, brand building would be focused on specific buyer personas.

    A lady in the audience asked a version of the question I wanted to ask. Precisely because digital gives us the capability to target an audience of one, shouldn’t brand communication follow? In other words, shouldn’t all user personas be buyer personas? The speaker stuck to his original point, his contention being that communication needs to be for an audience and not each individual. This is a topic I have spent quite some thinking time on, and have simplified into the 3 points below. (more…)