You’re just anybody without your identity
— Grenville Main, DNA Design
So, brands are relevant — they provide the rallying point to measure change in consumer behaviour, they help you predict whether your monthly investment plan is likely to be secure and can even reinforce the salience of one country over another. Even in Naomi Klein’s book No Logo, which aimed at preventing brands from taking over the public and private space of people — a bunch of kids getting the Nike swoosh tattooed on their calves being the extreme — the brand provided the idea against which she took a position.
You have only to see the Millward Brown survey of 100 most respected brands for the year 2010 (this survey combines financial indicators with quantitative consumer research, valuing brands across 17 categories from fast foods to oil and gas) which has 13 brands in it that come from the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries to appreciate the point. Most of these brands are from the infrastructure sector, such as Petrobras from Brazil, reflecting the changing times.
The Chinese mobile phone company China Mobile has been a consistent presence in the top 100 for all the five years that this survey has been published. A confirmation of the world’s (not just the US’) obsession with China and the growing clout of Made-in-China in the constantly growing mobile phone sector. Even better, this is the first time that an Indian company, ICICI Bank, figures in the top 100 brands, at number 45. Therefore, to say that it is time to sing a dirge for brands seems wrong. This is where one would disagree with Pradip Chanda — as the title of his book says this.
While Chanda painstakingly traces the rise of brands as brand equity became a powerful valuation tool and then gets into the heart of the knowledge consumer, he serves a very useful bridge between the old school of the 1980s and 1990s which believed in the supremacy of the brand (David Aaker’s Managing Brand Equity and Building Strong Brands being examples) and the new school that came up in the years after, around the time of the dotcom bust. The latter school advocated the need to create and sustain brand equity for the long term (Jean-Noel Kapferer’s Strategic Brand Management) and propounded new rules of engagement with the customer, and the need for a 360-degree approach to brand-marketing, in which everyone in the company needed to offer the customer a consistent brand experience across all touch points between the customer and the company. An interesting book from an ad agency perspective for Asia was The 360 Degree Brand in Asia by Blair, Armstrong and Murphy.
So, why does Chanda say it’s time for a requiem for brands? Could be because brands no longer command the undiluted attention they did in the past. A Google quickly replaces a Yahoo, but its Buzz can’t compete with a Twitter and the flavour of the season is Facebook. This seems particularly true of technology brands; one minute they exist and the next they don’t. Though, most often, they just as quickly become a part of our language. So we Google, we Bing, we Tweet on what’s hot, we go to cafes that are Wi-Fi-enabled and we can TiVo a show — that is the relevance of brands. And yet, as Chanda points out, today’s brands need to work much harder to remain relevant to their customers, and in an increasingly uncertain world, this translates to a commitment to creating certainty — certainty that there will be water and a clean, green earth for their kids, for example. Chanda uses the examples of Walmart and De Beers, both of which reinvented their images to achieve a connect with the knowledge consumer.
He explains how Walmart CEO Lee Scott sent a “go green” message in a speech in 2005 and pledged that by 2010, Walmart will create zero waste, trade only in products made with 100 per cent renewable energy and so on. While this was being implemented, in 2008 he hosted a gathering of over 1,000 leading suppliers, Chinese officials and NGOs in Beijing and said, “A company that cheats on the age of its labour, dumps chemicals in our rivers, will ultimately cheat on the quality of its products... same as cheating on customers. We will not tolerate that in Walmart.”
In the Indian context, though for a different reason, there’s no better example than ITC which has, over the last many years, consciously diversified from tobacco to FMCG and onto apparel, paper, agarbattis, ready-to-eat foods and much more, becoming carbon-neutral and water-positive all the while.
The future belongs to brands that are global but think local, that are willing to engage one-on-one with customers whether through social networking sites or through personalising the offering, that engage with customers through each and every marketing touch-point as close to the customer’s home as possible. Which is essentially a demand-side approach to brands.
A REQUIEM FOR A BRAND
Targeting The New-Age Consumer
Pradip Chanda
Roli Books
138 pages; Rs 250
