Imagine you are ill and you go to a doctor. If you know that the prescribed treatment has a bearing on the doctor's earnings, you will wonder if the good doc is even working in your best interests. On the other hand, if he charges you a fixed fee, you know it has no bearing on his `take-home'. And so you trust the prescribed treatment more, be it an operation, medication, or a change in lifestyle.
That is the kind of transparency and accountability that Anand Halve, erstwhile-CEO of Quadrant, and Kiran Khalap, ex-CEO of Bates Clarion, part of newly set up chlorophyll, a seven-member brand consulting firm, aim to offer. Says Halve, ``Transparency and neutrality are associated with management consultancies, and communication skills with agencies. We are a management consultancy with in-built communication skills.''
To ensure that marketers are assured that all advice is delinked from the firm's revenues, chlorophyll will operate on a fee-based structure. And, of course, it will shun media buying. Says Khalap, ``As agencies are rapidly unbundling many functions like media, the move towards a fee-based structure is logical.''
The firm will work on a few select clients and will take on four kinds of projects. These are...
nBrands in a pre-market entry situation,
nAny product concept that needs brand-building,
nExisting brands that are stagnating and...
nOver-extended brands which need portfolio rationalisation.
