The Hindu Business Line : Judging the Brands of the Year

LAST week the CII Brand Summit came to the city. It presented an unusual opportunity for marketers and brand managers in the city to hear a number of experts speak on the process of brand creation and management from a variety of perspectives. Having handled brands since the late '60s, it was refreshing for me to see some genuine enthusiasm at last for them. When some of us in the marketing game used to say that a company was nothing but a cluster of brands, or if it were a single business company, then the corporate reputation was encapsulated in the company brand name, there were very few takers. The attitude was that it was all right for Levers or Ponds or ITC but to which business in this fair city of Madras was branding of any great importance? At last it seems to be an idea whose time has come, since sometime in the last decade.

So with branding metrics becoming so important, it was good to be temporarily back in the world of brand presentations, as a member of a jury involved in the concluding stage of evaluations to arrive at the CII Brand of the Year. One must say without false modesty that it was an impressive group of friends and very well-respected elders of the marketing world. The organisers first of all deserve full marks for the way they went about the evaluations. An outside agency was chosen, and some 130 self-nominated entries were sifted through a multi-stage short-listing. They deliberately eschewed taking just a few large aggregate and obvious measures - such as awareness, market share, and growth. Next it was good that the whole occasion was not reduced to another Oscar-type media event with umpteen categories and sub-divisions and 57 varieties of prizes. There was just one Brand of the Year. I hope they will resist the ever-present temptation to deviate from this the next time around.

An attempt was made to collate a number of measurements in a `scientific' way including field interviews (very welcome indeed) to rank the brands which came in all shapes and sizes from all over the country. These took into account a large array of performance measures - turnover, growth, profits, relative market share, and brand investment, to name a few. Two things stood out in the total approach. One was the fact that allowance was made for variance in size and the measures were taken over a period of time, not just for the past year. To my knowledge, it was the first of its kind involving an all-India cross-section of companies. The judging too was done such that the expert jury participated only towards the end and their verdict was then computed into the aggregate numerical scores that had already been compiled.

The final short-list of five to make the presentations and be interrogated by the pundits comprised Nokia, Titan watches, Eveready batteries, Indane LPG and Dabur Chyavanprash. The short-list of ten had somewhat predictably included five brands of Hindustan Lever, who for reasons best known to them chose to stay away from the presentation stage and thus deny themselves the opportunity to be finally adjudged along with the rest of the mortal world! Here are some interesting features that came out in the cases studies - or at any rate caught my fancy.

Eveready is about to celebrate its centenary in India. Some staying power! One was reminded yet again how little the ultimate corporate entity mattered to the housewife or average consumer of household brands. The red-and-white versions of this relatively low-involvement product have weathered the storms of its original parent Union Carbide's life with little or no impact. If anything it was the incredibly cheap Chinese imports which halted them in their stride; but equally strangely those were practically wiped out because the life of the battery cells was ridiculously low! The smart segmentation of the two markets for the red-and-white versions as well as the imagery of the brand ambassador was interesting to see.

Yet another low-involvement category was the traditional ayurvedic supplement of Dabur. Once again here was a brand that fought sameness, consumer apathy, and sluggish growth by some repositioning. Increasingly, one wonders if this is bound to become a feature of many consumer markets as a result of rapidly rising consumer sophistication, tastes and choice.

Brands that at one time seemed to define the very category are some times threatened the most when that happens. Titan has remained a textbook case study of a truly Indian brand that innovated its way into the hearts and minds of millions of consumers. It is also a classic study now of the need to constantly refurbish, revive and reinvest in the best of thriving brands. Having redefined the category itself as a stylish accessory, promoted the owning of multiple watches by the same (typically, younger and more ambitious) person and having changed the rules of the game, what do you do for an encore? Here is a test case to see whether innovation and creativity have limits or simply need more and more deliberately differentiated thinking.

The surprise finalist was Indane in some sense, not merely because of its public sector style of functioning generally thought to be very distant from brand marketing, but also because it is a brand till recently on rationing and mere distribution - without competitive pressure. Most important of all it is still heavily subsidised as a matter of public policy and does not make a profit. Yet there was some news value in learning about the efforts to make the retail outlets more attractive and also provide for rural distribution through mobile refilling units. They too have their sachet - in the form of a 5 kg size!

Winner Nokia, of course, had all the cards distinctly stacked in its favour as a category with the highest possible involvement level today. Impressive indeed were the attempts made to localise the offering through use of Hindi and rural outreach similar to what the more familiar low-ticket products have always done.

Overall, however, the entire exercise convinced me again that while it is fashionable nowadays to reckon brand equity, investment and its return and brand valuation, sometimes we can get carried away by the enthusiasm for measurement. We are caught inextricably in a mental bind about calculating and engineering everything when it comes to any aspect of marketing. One must predict, control, measure and manipulate the various variables according to a grand design. We still haven't shed this managerial fallacy that brands and consumer perceptions, as indeed business success itself, are created and designed in the boardrooms instead of in the market place out there; so that anything worth its salt must be calibrated, benchmarked against some other brand or entity and only then can it be accepted as worth discussing.

There is a sad and dangerous fallacy in this notion, particularly when applied to the vital area of brands. For, essentially, a brand is an image, a perception, which in the aggregate and across a number of consumers, confers an advantage of trust, preference and loyalty to a particular marketer's offerings. It is well worth reminding ourselves therefore that in the final analysis consumers make the brand what it is and we must converse with them to create it together, at best - and not think we can mange the whole process at will.

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

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