No Brand Battle Freaks

Think 'Kingfisher' and chances are you are thinking beer,

airlines, Vijay Mallya.

Did you also relate to the Kingfisher as a member of the

cosmopolitan avian family Alcedinidae, order Coraciiformes, which also includes

the Australian kookaburra, Dacelo gigas?

Chances are NO. That's the power of branding. And reams and

reams have been written about it. While tech MNCs have been the masters of this

game (IT majors like Microsoft, IBM and HP are reportedly spending between

$100-500 mn worldwide on advertising), Indian tech majors are yet to catch-up.

And the situation for SMB players can well be imagined. However, one is

witnessing some action in the SMB space with few Indian companies (like WeP)

looking at branding seriously. But a majority of SMB companies can only frown to

ask: Will heavy investments in branding kill the business?

The answer, it emerges, is no.



In a country like India, where small companies hardly give priority to

branding, it would require much more than just thought leadership to understand

this--demystifying myths, created by the FMCG sector, being one of them.

"The moment you think branding, you think of Rs 6 crore. Brand is a

thought. Building it does not necessarily cost huge money," branding

evangelist Harish Bijoor tells.

The point, perhaps, is to understand the difference between

traditional soft service marketing and technology marketing. In the B2B space,

every tech company is the product. A company in the IT services space is not

about offering services alone. The brand name of the company is what gives it

the respect when it goes out to sell. The brand here is every single employee of

the company who delivers services, sells and spreads the good word about his

company amongst friends in a pub.

A brand therefore has two aspects--the external and the

internal. The external part is what every customer interacts with, and the

internal aspect is what every employee thinks of the brand. "For the SMEs

in the tech services and products space, about 66% of importance is given to the

internal brand. In the FMCG sector, 93% is external branding and only 7% is

internal branding," says Bijoor.

The other point to understand is that FMCG products are a habit.

Technology becomes a habit only after a few years. "Technology has a bigger

curiosity element, like it happened with the iPod. It won't happen in the mass

consumer market where a toothpaste is a toothpaste irrespective of the brand.

There is no surprise," says Shombit Sengupta of Shining Emotional Surplus,

the company in the news for helping WeP Peripherals transform into a new

corporate identity. Branding, Indian IT companies should understand, is not only

for selling a product. It is essential to hire good people and retain them.

"It is not just logo design either. It is an ecology of the whole

organizational focus in the market. You will have to understand the

consumer," he says.

In the case of software products, where building a successful

product branding strategy is of utmost importance and also a pain point for

Indian companies, understanding the customer's environment--his lifecycle,

lifestyle and trends--also helps. "An international IT product company will

analyze your whole ecology, how you breathe, how you smell, what is your

lifestyle. This is what Indians don't understand. Marketing is understanding

the deeper ecology of human beings," Shombit adds.

IT products might often become obsolete or need upgradation,

unlike an FMCG product where you can use it for 10-15 years. So, how do you keep

your brand value in the consumer's mind? The answer is, by building a brand

bottom up. Bijoor's research findings state that 3/4th of a brand in the FMCG

space is liquid, the part of the brand that deals with the image of the product.

Only a quarter is solid, which is the product per se. In the IT services space

today, 30% is liquid and 70% is solid. "Look at Tally: 70% of its brand is

solid-the product features, its USP etc-30% is liquid. Focus on the liquid.

Every user is a soft person and there is something called a brand cascade. Once

you have a little bit of success, it cascades into another and that into

another," he says.

But since the 'Made in India' product label is not too well

known as of now, some people have advised dissociating the brand from the

country of origin. This could be a wrong approach in the IT space, as Indian IT

is respected today, experts point out. Many years ago, we used to say, 'Made

in India'. It flopped because we made lousy cars and watches and exported

them. Now, we have done a good job of serving the entire world in the IT space.

So, we need not be defensive about our India status," says Bijoor.

Recommended slogan change: 'Served out of India'.

Goutam Das

in Bangalore

What's in a name?

Many technology companies like precise and descriptive names.

But what happens when a few years later, the names are outdated? Silicon

Graphics had to change over to SGI because silicon wasn't cutting edge

technology anymore. America Online is now AOL because the word 'America'

didn't do well in Europe. But branding gurus are divided over the issue with

some taking a purist stance, saying that names don't matter beyond a point.

The value behind the name is what matters. But something like 'Sri Ramakrishna

Software' wouldn't work because the technology connect is missing, says

Harish Bijoor.

Bijoorspeak

A five-step guide to enhancing the liquid part of brand

1. Ensure your internal branding is strong...if not, focus

on it and spend enough time on it

2. Do not be besotted with hollow external branding

3. Breathe integrity into your brand

4. Get service centric rather than product centric in your

branding, because every product is in reality a service. Customers interact with

the service...and not the product

5. Remember that the user is a human being at the end of it all.

He is soft, real and irrational.

Bloom Time!

WeP Peripherals gears up to surprise the consumer

In a major repositioning effort, India's largest

"employee owned company" WeP Peripherals changed over to a new

corporate name and identity to realign itself with end-consumer needs.

The official announcement in this regard came in Dubai recently.

The company, which had clocked a topline growth of Rs 286 crore

in FY 05, has re-christened itself as 'Bloom' and the new logo is a red

berry with an embedded chip. The slogan, which WeP calls its coherency driver,

is: 'Your Tech Fantasy'.

The metamorphosis to Bloom, WeP feels, is "aspirational

across customer and consumer segments and provides a differentiating identity

with customer care, freshness and youthfulness." The coherency driver

interlinks internal and external processes with customer and consumer

deliverables and the 'fantasy-berry' logo with its innumerable grains

suggest the binary language of 01010101. The embedded chip stands for 'tech',

the rational factor in the company's activity domain, the berry represents the

consumer's 'fantasy'.

WeP had engaged Shombit Sengupta's Shining Emotional Surplus-the

same people who gave Wipro its rainbow flower and defined its current IT focus-for

corporate transformation since the last two years. Shining essentially changed

the whole organizational structure, aligning it with customer sensitivity, also

giving the company a new vision in the process.

WeP's organizational structure was product-driven, based on

verticals-printers, UPS, consumables, after market business. As part of its

new strategy, it would now have a consumer products vertical (laser printer, UPS

to cater to SOHO, small enterprises), a business products vertical (impact

printers where end customers are large organizations and banks, financial

institutions) and service.

Its products are also being re-designed to give a fantasy feel.

The UPS, for example, will now be packaged as TOP.UPS, which with its new 'robotic',

colorful look and interactive functional features like digital time display and

socket for mobile charge, can sit on top of the table instead underneath it.

The morale of the change: Surprise the consumer. In a crowded

marketplace, this just might be the right dose to attract him.