Branding and Shakespeare

Pepsi v/s Bontova, Roger Federer v/s Somdev Varman, Marlboro v/s Char Minar, Gucci v/s Akhil Ribbons. Which one would 9 out of 10 people opt for? Not a difficult choice, is it? What is the driving factor behind going for the former? You might say Quality, Excellence, etc..etc.....And then there is the Brand.

A brand may be a name, sign, design, or a combination of these which identifies a product/service, and differentiates from a similar competitor in the market. Now when I say that Kingfisher is among the 10 most valuable brands in India, you might not be surprised. But if I say that Kigfisher is incurring huge losses and is one of the top brands in India, people might even say that I am deranged ( That debate is saved for some other day). The point is that the performance of a brand is the perception of the same in the consumer’s mind. So even though it might be incurring crores of losses and its revenues plummeting, the consumer thinks otherwise given Kingfisher’s rising market share.

So, is branding all about creating a monopoly in the market? We have several cases which would appear to say so. Well, a case against point is the Xerox machines. Though Xerox enjoys a tremendous branding vis-à-vis ‘Xerox’ Machines, they are under a great dilemma now that they want to diversify.

That brings us to our next question .Is branding important? Well, when we build a brand, we build a unique identity that customers love and respect. This ultimately helps a company survive in the long run. Take Godrej, for example. One generally associates a safe in a house with Godrej. Godrej represents reliability, strength. However, in the face of the 21^st century, its stocks dipped. I mean, who wants boring and drab? Bring on the colour. And that’s exactly what Godrej did. A splash of colour, and they suddenly become a youthful old company. The share prices skyrocketed once more. Brand Godrej after all. It may be down, but not out!

So, how do we go about creating a brand equity? It is not just about selling everything and hoping that word-of-mouth publicity does it. In a world where all actions are marked by larger than life repercussions, any statement has to be bold, it has to connect with the consumer. Creative advertising is one way. One of my favorite telefilms by Aviva Life Insuance where a lady enters her house and seeing things strewn about and her husband dead (though he was taking a snooze), and the few anxious moments thereof was an instant connect with the masses as this was something they could empathize with. Another way of creating a brand equity is association with a celebrity, where the brand of the latter is used to rub off on the former.

So, next time when you see Shah Rukh peering at you from a billboard , remember that it is not the product that he advertises, but the fact that he is endorsing a product that would get 30% people scavenging their money bags to get one of those. That is the power of brand.

Again, branding comes naturally to us. We may call it stereotyping, but we tend to brand everything. I mean, if I say that "typical XYZish behavior", where XYZ is the name of a college - that is because of past trysts with people from that college ( even Genetic Algorithms work on this kind of thing) - I am branding a person from XYZ without maybe knowing who he/she is/stands for, but still am reasonably confident of my decision. So, a brand is also built by experience.

Shakespeare once wrote, “Whats in a name? An apple with any other name would taste just as sweet”. On second thoughts, maybe not today. More than the actual product, a brand is becoming more and more important for a purchase decision. Probably Shakespeare would have flunked marketing lessons!