The Hindu Business Line : Enter the corporate brand

THINK of names like Nike, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Sony, Honda — and you can see that they not merely have a commanding global presence and consumer familiarity but a great advantage in being names of both brands as well as corporate giants. The situation of others such as General Motors, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Nestle, for example, is very different. They have to depend for their continued existence on the continuance of strong consumer preference for a number of individual brand names, and therefore personalities even within very similar categories. In these days of severe pressures on margins and rising media costs and clutter, the advantage of the former, an umbrella or house name, is immense and likely to grow.

However, if a chairman of a company came to you and wanted you to help in building a corporate brand, preferably in double-quick time, what would you do? How and where would you begin to deal with the question? This is the sort of open-ended question that would make many managers in media and advertising fields get goose bumps with delight! Many an account executive would salivate in anticipation of a corporate campaign, a corporate film, print ads in full page colour, across all sorts of media, some prominent hoardings and a couple of events thrown in, for live audience participation, featuring a celebrity as brand ambassador and so on, all adding up to an unexpected billing bonanza. If it were a large enough client, the agency chief would have started preparing for a grand presentation, and already hearing the cash register ringing.

Believe me, I have watched this scene unfold in front of my eyes more than once, so there is nothing fanciful or exaggerated about this. The '70s and '80s saw large-scale press campaigns especially by public sector corporations, used often `simply as PR' when they had neither great marketing benefit to seek nor much competition to fear. The target audience often times was a few select people in Mumbai and New Delhi. And one has seen this from both sides of the table. In one instance, a set of recommendations, besides the usual media ones, including corporate philanthropy and scholarships, annual orations in memory of the founder, were always available to be whipped out and suitably modified regardless of who wanted it. A particularly articulate and ambitious senior client-servicing manager whom I knew many years ago used a base document almost as a template for all his clients. When one client's silver jubilee plans got shelved, the plans were submitted to another for a similar use or an occasion such as a public issue.

The fact is that contrary to what the text books might tell you, building a particular set of associations as corporate reputation (which in essence is the brand personality) is still confused with large and visible advertising efforts that mainly extol the virtues of the founding fathers and the achievements of the company in the market place and technology arena.

Advertising is one, but only one, of the tools of building an overall set of feelings, beliefs, and attitudes around the corporate brand. After it is established, the halo of the name, such as Tata or Sony or Toyota does indeed impart much power and glory to the sub-brands, businesses and units under the umbrella; but that is not to say that one can impart such an effect by the corporate media effort however well-orchestrated or heavy it might be. In many cases, as we know, the parent corporation is in the background and the individual brands and businesses flourish on their own, partly because of the historical diversity and complexity of the group structure — the obvious Indian examples being the large conglomerates such as the Birlas and Tatas. Indeed, it was only very recently that the advantages of leveraging the name in all sorts of ways began to be appreciated in the case of one of the sub-groups of the Birlas, the Aditya Birla group, which has sought to bring about some form of thematic unity to its corporate purpose.

At times, under Asian conditions, such unity is difficult to establish. For purely historical reasons, commonality in business purposes and therefore target audiences simply does not exist. The only thing linking some individual firms, apart from a patriarch, might well be that the same family happened to start the enterprise or buy it at some point in the distant past. A few can be said to have a general theme as, say, TVS or the Munjals in the automotive category. Some families might have a strong bias towards, say, textiles, commodities, trading or steel and so on — such as the Lalbhais, the Mittals or the Hindujas. And because the businesses have had to grow opportunistically if they were to grow at all, given the MRTP and other regulatory shackles of the post-independence decades, the essential similarity or true nature of the corporate differentiation is something that needs a careful scrutiny; and must be internally debated and articulated first.

Now is a good time to do this because the first fifteen years of the new economic policies have seen much restructuring, rationalisation and realignment of corporate interests. Many have exited businesses that offered neither synergy in growth nor profit opportunity. New businesses such as those in the IT and IT-related market spaces have been created, new technologies have been assimilated. And in some outstanding cases, the first steps have been taken by Indian companies towards a multi-country presence. All this means a need for gathering together what is the core strength and character of a "group" or corporate unit — and then to proceed toward the very challenging stages of building a long-term portfolio of multiple markets and businesses. The task of establishing a name afresh is difficult enough in India but to do this all over the Asia-Pacific region, for example, is both expensive and daunting. Organisations may baulk at the size of the task but in some sense they will have to ask the tough question: If Toyota has the Toyota Way, what do we have? What is the glue that binds our organisations together, regardless of how far apart they are, all over the globe?

Where the natural common theme does not exist either in the form of consumers, markets, channels or technologies, corporate brand building might have to turn to that indefinable but nonetheless powerful feature of organisations called the culture, or `the way we (as distinct from others) do things around here.' People-related practices and policies, philosophies and structures, methods of dealing with markets and partners, and value systems — all of these are potential areas for obtaining some degree of commonality, if not uniformity. If such underlying unity is part of the way of life, and not just a matter of paying lip service to slogans, there is some hope for building a corporate brand as a source of shared advantage.

It must, however, be granted that in today's business world, a favourable corporate image is indeed much better appreciated, and far more valuable than ever before. Links with audiences are essential for a variety of reasons: to inform the shareholders, reassure prospective institutional investors, to keep up the right level of rapport and understanding with the analysts, attract the right sort of talent in an intensely competitive market place, to build a network of dealers and suppliers, and to create goodwill amongst the future generations who may be onlookers or marginal consumers today. All of this cannot simply be achieved by the weight of media expenditure or decibel levels. A long and carefully thought out strategy must be sustained — at times allowing the individual products' performance to contribute to the overall image of the corporation and at other times the reverse. To think of this as a task of merely establishing memorable slogans, symbols and names alone is to dangerously oversimplify the issues involved.

(The author is a student and observer of markets, people and organisations.)

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Price pyrotechnics

Dead man selling!

A profile of the rural consumer

`Branding has moved to the boardroom'

Mr Speed

Direct to consumer

Enter the corporate brand

The easiest thing is to go with a trusted brand