The brand doctors

Three leading consultants offer prescriptions for taking Indian brands global

Ask Bangaloreans about the Mavalli Tiffin Room, and you're likely to get a knowing nod. Now ask them about MTR Foods, and you've started a conversation.

The restaurant forebear of the processed food manufacturer may not be as well-known, but it is revered in the garden city for its tasty food and uncompromising quality. Attributes MTR Foods wanted to emphasise when it decided to go national and global.

The first task was to set up a new factory. Then the company roped in brand design consultancy Ray+Keshavan Design to redo its persona. The challenge was obvious: attract young and new territories at home and abroad while retaining the old brand equity.

First the logo was changed, taking care to maintain a link with tradition while projecting a universal look. And as MTR Foods went into ready-to-eat foods, frozen foods and instant mixes, the packaging was designed to look "appetising". New kiosks were set up at fair grounds and exhibitions, which displayed the new products and offered free samples, but care was taken to prominently display black-and-white blowups of the old MTR restaurant.

Ray+Keshavan completely made over MTR Foods by designing the packaging for nearly 300 products in 13 categories. It covered the visual identity (brand, logo, colours), packaging and trade design (how an item looks), signage, retail environment, the website and the company stationery.

To maintain a harmony between all these without having to constantly micro-manage the details, Ray+Keshavan produced a brand book. "We don't do advertising but lay down guidelines for it. We say, this is your photographic style, typographics, colours. Work within these, don't compromise the brand identity," explains Ray+Keshavan Managing Director Sujata Keshavan Guha.

But this is not a story on MTR's metamorphosis. This is about the broader picture: when brands that are a byword for quality and a versatile product range feel the need to reposition themselves, something's up. Indian companies are rushing to declare themselves "global", but one factor is in danger of getting crushed underfoot "" the Indian brand.

To go global, Indian companies have also to go global as brands, so that they are easily positioned in everyone's minds across continents. Such brands need advisers "" strategists, master craftsmen and artists "" to shape them for the global marketplace, the global consciousness. And it is perhaps natural that three of the most effective brand doctors, adept at radically transforming brands, work out of Bangalore, the most global of Indian cities. They are Shombit Sengupta, Sujata Keshavan Guha and Harish Bijoor.

If you're looking for a brand doctor with international experience, it's difficult to beat Sengupta, who began in Paris in 1984 and relocated to Bangalore three years ago. As a strategist, he transforms companies addressing, in the process, the brands they stand for. The global companies and brands he has worked include, among others, Remy Martin, L'Oreal and Nestle.

At the other end of the spectrum is Guha who shapes the look, touch and feel of brands. Every private sector company among India's top 10 firms is a Ray+Keshavan client.

And somewhere in between the two stands Bijoor, maverick newcomer to brand-building. Bijoor deconstructs and rebuilds a brand by listening to customers. He then gives the branding exercise a key role in a company by getting a committee, headed by the CEO, to take on the responsibility of its brand management.

Business for all three is booming. In the three years he's been in India, Sengupta's Shining Emotional Surplus has doubled business and expects to "grow very fast next year". Guha is equally bullish "" but then, with margins of 50 per cent and 25 per cent year-on-year growth, who wouldn't be? She has a staff of around 20 and finds that the main constraint to growth is the availability of good designing skills in India.

Bijoor heads Harish Bijoor Consults, funded by the Smithsonian group of the US. He has 23 people working for him and expects to grow by 90 to 100 per cent next year.

What is the driver behind this demand for the skills of brand and strategy consultants? Guha traces the change in the Indian business environment to around five or six years ago when the pressure of competition forced companies to look at issues as basic as their addresses and packaging.

But why is it that global companies, even after achieving great heights, do not go to sleep but remain innovative? Sengupta says the events of the 20th century made companies "innovate in order to survive". "Twenty years ago, industry dictated terms to the market, today it is the opposite," he adds.

What should the Indian brand aspire to in order to arrive globally? It is the age of services and Sengupta sees India's greatest asset as the quality of its people. "What is missing in the Indian psyche and among most Indian companies is the urge to innovate," he says.

Bijoor's idea of going forward is to build the India brand on which will ride piggyback all the corporate brands, every brand a subset of the umbrella brand. In doing this, a mistake of the past has to be avoided. India has for decades sought to make a success of the "made in India" initiative and got nowhere. Bijoor also sees a great future for India in agriculture. This is because the world is moving towards an ethos of organic farming, which was central to Indian agriculture until independence.

Mulching, the use of neem and gobar were all quintessentially Indian agricultural practices that were sustainable and whose time seems to have returned. Bijoor's recipe for making India and Indian companies into successful global brands is to adopt 'served out of India' and 'grown in India'."