Madhukar Sabnavis: Is brand success a random act?

The best way to manage brand business is to accept it and work alongside it

In 1981, at Headingley, following on 235 runs behind, England were 135 for six at tea. Everything seemed over for England. Ian Botham then produced the innings of his life in the post-tea session, knocking up an unbeaten 149 and England ended up 350 all out. Willis then bowled an inspired spell taking eight wickets and England won the match.

When Botham was asked what was his strategy during that post-tea session, he confessed quite humbly and honestly that he took his chances as he had nothing to lose and it all luckily worked out.

In Seven Life Lessons of Chaos, John Briggs and F David Peat postulate that God made everything in the world to behave randomly. In fact, randomness is around all of us.

1. Mathematics, the supposedly most "precise" science, discovered randomness when it discovered irrational numbers""where the next number in the decimal place cannot be predicted.
2. The randomness of waves ensures that no equation can be discovered for the length of any coastline of the world. It is changing shape and length every moment randomly.
3. In an atom, electrons move around its nucleus in a random fashion and its path cannot be algebraically expressed.
4. Finally, the human heart-beat becomes predictive only once""when it stops. Else, the cardiograph is a picture of random peaks and troughs.

Clearly, metaphysically, the world has been made to behave in a random order. The order that seems to happen around us is actually a product of the universe's internal system that tends to self-organise to ensure the preservation of internal equilibrium. Man's attempt to get order in life is actually about going against the grain of the creator.

Brand and market behaviour cannot be de-linked from the cosmic universe. While reams of paper have been written on brand successes, no one has ever discovered the formula for success. Past experiences can at best be guidelines for the future but no guarantee for success. If a readymade formula was available, the patent owner would be incredibly rich and there would be no brand failures!

Jack Welch in Straight from the Gut says: "There is no formulaic answer to business problems. The process helps you get closer to the darker side of gray. There are rarely black-or-white answers. More often than not, business is smell, feel and touch as much as or more than numbers. If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass by us." This is perhaps closest to the truth.

This is not to debunk the value of process and historical lessons but to put them in perspective. History is replete with examples of brands that used the most extensive of processes and the best of minds to create incredible mixes that finally failed in the marketplace. Ford's Edsel car and Classic Coke are now part of brand failure folklore.

At the same time, history is equally replete with brand turnarounds, where leaders have been deified for their foresight in taking bold decisions and giving new life to their brands. Lou Gerstner for IBM in the mid-1990s and Lee Iacocca for Chrysler are representative of this genre of people.

However, there must have been many more business leaders who dared to be foresightful and took bold decisions that made little difference to their businesses or markets. They remain unknown because, much as business leaders and writers say that failures teach more than successes, few failures have been comprehensively documented.

Business writers and observers make money by glorifying success and drawing lessons from turnaround cases. One possible interpretation could be that the men in saddle in the successful turnaround situations had nothing to lose and everything to gain by taking the risks they did.

The successes became famous; the failures remain unknown and unheard. Both were perhaps random events. And the successful managers not humble enough as Botham to ascribe it to "calculated" risks that just worked!

Marketing principles are constantly being rewritten by changing market dynamics and new success stories. Marketers are today questioning Al Ries and Jack Trout's theory that a brand must stand for a category.

"Umbrella" branding is gaining credence in a world of limited resources, fragmented media, and competitive, crowded categories. The "core competence" theory postulates sticking to your knitting""but with a growing obsolescence of categories, knitting gets redefined as broader skills to accommodate new diversifications.

And finally Ricardo Semlar dispelled old organisational practices by redefining management principles in an ongoing, manufacturing concern in a developing economy""suddenly creating a new paradigm of management. So the truth is nothing is cast in stone.

How do brand businesses cope in an environment where no guidelines and practices can be held sacrosanct as a "formula" for success?

The transition of the Indian cinema industry in the last two decades is fairly instructive of a business' typical reaction to competition. Bollywood ruled the roost till the mid-1980s, when the video "menace" hit the industry.

While it was true that cinema viewership had dropped because of video availability, the industry remained insensitive to another change happening in the environment""the emergence of free entertainment in the form of TV (serials like Hum Log and Buniyaad were part of social life by that time) was also perhaps eating into its viewership.

Instead of reinventing and reacting, Bollywood got caught in the trap of fighting video piracy through governmental intervention""assuming that would help their business. Result: As long as the industry remained paranoid and paralysed by the video threat and did nothing about itself, nothing changed.

Then the industry""film makers and film screeners""got together and redefined consumer viewing experience through superior cinema halls, an innovative marketing of films, and more recently, segmentation of films""focusing on new (like NRI) and specific audiences.

Hum Aapke Hain Kaun was a trendsetter in this context, releasing only one print per city and ensuring the halls in which it was released were upgraded. Today with more serious TV viewing options available, films continue to co-exist successfully alongside all the other entertainment and leisure mediums, including DVDs!

Simply put, the environment is neither controllable nor easily predictable. A brand business needs to, perhaps, remember the following:

1. Don't get paranoidabout competition. It is important to keep an eye on it but equally important to continue with one's own agenda.
2. Don't get paralysedif competition makes the next big move. One will not always be the first mover and someone else may make the better move earlier. But that is not the end of the world. What's important is to react, and react fast.
3. Don't keep waiting for the next big, perfect idea and thus miss the incremental small changes that could help. It's better to act and fail than not act and watch someone else move. Keep pushing the frontiers all the time. Successful brand businesses like GE and Sony have remained at the top without necessarily creating revolutions every year""but by continuously doing little innovations to remain ahead of their pack.

In sum, brand business is no different from life as defined by Briggs and Peat. Markets, consumers, and their behaviour are non-controllable by a marketer. And the most enlightened way to manage it is to accept it and work alongside it, rather than attempt to control it through processes.

Something worth thinking about.

madhukar.sabnavis@ogilvy.com

(The writer is Country Manager ""Discovery, Ogilvy and Mather India. The views expressed are personal)