The Hindu Business Line : Leadership is branding

LEADERSHIP and branding are hot topics on the seminar circuit. Many executive development programmes are built around these subjects. Leadership means different things to different people. It means the ability to inspire. It is charisma, courage, and even sacrifice. Leadership requires vision. Leadership is talked about in the rarefied atmosphere of CEO conferences, business schools, HR meets, and strategy meets. There seems to be an unstated and unanimous agreement that leadership is too important, too-sweeping-in-its-scope, too-good-to-be-described, and is therefore a too-complex-to-be-systematically-deployed concept. Everyone is convinced that such indescribable leadership must be good for any organisation.

Branding too captures the imagination of people. For some CEOs it is a reverential item high on the agenda. For CFOs it is a black hole of cash. Salespeople think it is a watering hole for unsuccessful ex-salesmen. For M & A specialists it is a valuation game. It is a playground of creativity for advertising agencies. It is PR first for PR agencies. For many, branding means eye-catching, entertaining, beautiful visual and audio communications or smart copy. Everyone knows branding and everyone has definite opinions about it.

Is there then any connection between leadership and branding? Leaders are responsible for branding. But they are also responsible for many other things. Are there any fundamental linkages?

The answer for that might be found in people, since leadership and brands exist in the minds of people. Brands provide neat and crisp symbols denoting product performance levels, shared experiences, dreams, aspiration and expectations of actual and potential users. Who will deny that leadership too deals with shared dreams, aspirations, and expectations of all stakeholders - customers, employees, vendors and others? Like brands, leaders are seen as icons.

There has to be a customer community based on shared expectations and understanding for a brand to come into existence. Amul is built literally on the basis of a community - a community of 2.2 million milk producers! This makes Amul sensitive to communities. A whole generation of people have grown up reading and talking about those "Utterly butterly delicious" hoardings and their tongue-in-cheek messages in Mumbai. Amul is still a very strong brand.

Leadership without a constituency is unthinkable. Leaders build constituencies through shared understanding of goals and ways to achieve them.

How do communities come into existence? A unique feature, a benefit, some newness, or drama sets people talking. When people talk, when they integrate products in their lives, when they constantly share their experiences, problems or solutions communities are formed. Communities can also be built around new categories of products. People love to talk. They need to share things. It is for a company to create or articulate such uniqueness, to express it evocatively, and to nudge and support its customers into sharing it. Can this be done by the marketing department alone? Can this happen by bombarding customers with advertisements, direct mail, or price promotions? Can this happen without a strong leadership?

Customers get messages from others competing for their attention. They get familiar and bored with products or services. There is therefore a need to extend, broaden or deepen their beliefs about what is possible. Look at the FMCG sector (quoting from a study by AC-Nielsen): At roughly 30 years, skin cream is the youngest category in the top 10. The other categories are on the wrong side of 50, with categories like tea and soaps crossing the century-mark. How can one get consumers genuinely interested? The easy way is throwing money at them, through discounting, freebies and the like. A more difficult but sustainable way is creating new products or categories for carefully chosen segments of customers and showing them what is possible. In this way brands can delight customers.

Bringing irrepressible delight to customers is the soul of branding. Products or services have to be upgraded constantly. New products have to be launched. Supply and distribution chains have to be re-oriented. Customer communities have to be engaged by continuously raising the bar. The entire organisation has to be behind this. Brands are successful when customers' lives or professions get positively charged by all that is done by them. A mere reputation of products should give way to activating customers' imagination. Just as brands raise bars, leaders broaden the horizons of their people. They inspire people to outdo themselves. Leadership means moving away from authority to respect, and from respect to inspiration.

Strong and successful brands go beyond performance and excitement. They must stand for something which has lasting relevance. Products change, technologies change, but brands with strong attitudes, beliefs, and values remain relevant. Here again Amul comes to mind. Amul's hoardings became the talk of the town. They exuded the "utterly butterly delicious" attitude. Who can resist that humour and freshness? Who can resist innocence and poking fun at things around us? Doesn't building such brands require strong leaders with a sense of mission?

It takes something more to bring brands to life. Brands need style. A distinctive appearance, user interface, or handling gives a very recognisable face and an aura to a brand. Without style brands would be dependable, high-performance, but faceless products. Everything would be just right about them but they would be boring. They wouldn't invoke strong likes or dislikes. They wouldn't be real brands. Product or services design, the way customers are expected to choose, acquire, learn, and use them must be woven into the brand concept from the beginning. Style is a must for creating cult brands. Style is created through design of products. Toyota cars are just right when it comes to performance, safety, handling, or service. They look good. But they lack the distinctiveness of the new Honda City, which has made its mark not just by a quirky, in-your-face kind of stance, but a strange marriage of a tall-boy design with an aerodynamic body. Design was a very important element behind building coffee bar brands like Barista or Café Coffee Day. Many Indian brands do not achieve class because their leaders fail to insist on excellence in product design. Many good products fail in the market place due to poor design. Style makes a statement, a brand needs it.

Leaders have vision, mission, and agenda for their constituencies. They are being constantly observed, emulated, or criticised. They need to make a statement all the time. Successful leaders know this intuitively and develop distinctive styles of their own.

Without the backing of a community, without constantly shaping of expectations, and without class, products would just be fads or fashions. This is what most companies end up in doing under the name of branding. Style and hype are often taken as branding.

Imagine a leader without a constituency, without inspiring vision, without a mission, and without enabling execution. Such a leader may have authority and style. The result would be just arbitrariness and pompousness. Leaders with just authority and style generate a lot of hype and sycophancy but nothing else.

Branding requires taking a distinctive position and sticking to it. Intel, though it supplied more than 80 per cent of the microprocessors to the world's computers, was hardly known outside a small band of industry insiders. Andy Grove led Intel into an aggressive branding campaign "Intel inside" that made the company a household name. Grove spotted the gap of perception in markets. Consumers gave no thought to what is inside PCs, leaving it all to the PC makers, motherboard suppliers, and assemblers. For a technology company, this meant the risk of commoditisation, almost a death sentence. Such decisions require overarching vision which can come only from a strong, capable leader. Both involve choices. Deciding what should not be done is more important than what should be done. A brand cannot satisfy all types of customers. To earn the loyalty of some it must be willing to let other types go to other brands. Similarly a leader cannot please everyone. Often a leader has to make painful trade-offs. Focus - staying true to the core of the chosen position - is vital for leadership and brand-building. Both require commitment to respective constituencies.

Branding must lead to demonstrable improvement in the lives of customers and performance of companies. Top line growth, growth in margins, better forecasting, reduction in profit volatility must be the branding objectives and measures. Branding budgets will then qualify as investments in future, and not just as an item in revenue expenses. Leadership, similarly, should aim for demonstrable improvement in the lives and performance of all stakeholders — customers, employees, suppliers, share-holders, and society.

In today's world leadership is branding. Successful branding and great leadership require vision, values, performance, style and community building. Both require making difficult choices, sticking one's neck out, readiness to face the guillotine when the time comes, and grace to accept success. Leadership and branding are possible only with passion, thinking, working, first walking alone, and then rallying others around.

(The author provides consultancy and coaching to CEOs in branding and leadership practices through Exponient Consulting.)

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