The Hindu Business Line : Brands in the blog age

AN EVENTFUL YEAR: Celebrities from cinema and cricket donned numerous avatars for various brands, big-ticket retail took off, brands made plans to rise above surrogate advertising and blogs were the medium of choice for companies that wished to build brands.

I was born on the backside of a cow. The year was 1726. Guys in the Wild West were very protective about their cows. Most cows looked alike. Most cowherds took their cows to graze on the same pastures. The cows mixed with one another. There were bulls too. And a lot happened. But that's another story altogether.

At the end of an evening of grazing, the cowherd wanted to take back the very cows he had brought with him in the morning from home. He found it difficult to do this. He thought up a system. He took a hot iron and branded the skin of the cows that belonged to him. Now, things were simple. His cows and bulls were easy to identify. The brand as identification, a differentiator, a symbol, uniqueness and much more was born. My posterior was never the same again. The brand was here!

From then to the year 2006, a lot of water has passed under the bridge of branding. The year 2006 was as unique as it can get. A year that saw tumult! A year that saw experimentation with brand thoughts that seemed to work in some measure and fail in big measure as well. Time for a recap of the brand trends that defined the year just gone by.

The brand got off the television

This year they got me off my favourite medium, the idiot box. These brand guys in the big corporate organisations wanted me to do more. They said I was getting too passive. Not intrusive enough. These guys in their air-conditioned cubicles wanted me to intrude more into peoples' lives. They called it intrusive branding. While they continued to sit in their AC cubicles, they wanted me to slog it out in the great Indian marketplace. They wanted activation.

They wanted me to walk the talk, and not just talk the talk. Consumer-touch occasions were in sharp focus. Brand activation people had a field day. New jobs were created. There are many types of brand managers now. There was the big guy who sat out in Singapore, Hong Kong, or wherever the regional brand think-tank sat. Then there was the country brand manager, who sat in a Mumbai or a Delhi or a Bangalore. This guy was still the local strategy guy. And then there were brand activation folk. These folk slogged with me in the marketplace, and flogged every bit of my touchy-feely bits with the consumer at the store and at her home alike.

Brands, therefore, got off the television more and more. Home-to-home activation was in. The biggest FMCG players realised that the biggest successes of the year gone by were an Amway and a Tupperware, which did the home thingy pretty well. 1:1 was in focus again. This time it was 1:1 at the point of purchase (PoP) and 1:1 at the point of consumption as well.

The PoP morphed

With this absolute besottedness of marketers with activation, the point of purchase — the Great Indian Kirana — morphed.

The PoP today is not only the point of purchase but the point of advertising, of marketing, of branding. In short, the point of everything.

Companies poured more and more money into branding the point of purchase. The HLL Super Value store boards multiplied all over the country. Still bigger guys decided to set up their own chain of outlets. Reliance Retail happened on a test basis in Hyderabad. From 11 to 22 to 33. Footfalls remained robust, intermediaries lost out on business, and the aggregation of the fruit and vegetable business just about started. The standard-priced vegetable that is priced the same right through the year became a brand thought the consumer had to grapple with. Farm-gate prices remained pathetic, though.

I was born on the rear end of a cow. Today I am on everything there is to eat, drink and partake of. I will soon be on every brinjal and radish and ginger root in your local Reliance store. This is just the beginning. There will be a little bit of Reliance, a little bit of the Aditya Birla group, a little bit of Bharti-Walmart and a little bit of Tesco on everything that you will use in some way or the other.

Dull and drab retail is out. The retail point is now a glitzy place to go. Remember though, you can't walk in there the way you walk into the local corner shop, in your Hawaii slippers, crumpled old nightie and shawl draped around you in perfunctory coyness. Your nails need to be painted just right, your slippers need to look right and you might as well have that bright new lipstick on. Who know, you just might meet Mrs Kapur as well at your local Reliance Retail! Retail is a social occasion too!

Mall-ification of India

Malls abound today. In all, 176 malls to date. A proposed 220 more to be added in 2007! This is now not a Gurgaon-Noida-Mumbai-Delhi-Hyderbad-Kolkata-Bangalore phenomenon alone. The 52 one-million-plus population towns all have their own little malls.

The Mall is becoming a haven for the brand that normally gets lost on the high street. There are just too many high streets in our big cities. The mall piles up all these high streets one on top of another, adds air-conditioning, adds a food court, a multiplex, and the `mallification' of India is complete.

What in nomenclature terms started as "Mall Road" in every hill station of our lives, be it Darjeeling or Shimla, is today the standard feature of a happening little town. This is the place to be seen at. Never mind if the buys are not hot, this is a place to go. If you are part of the happening set, you will be seen at a mall. The brand that wants eyeballs has to be within a mall. I am, therefore, within a mall. This is comfort living at its best.

Store brands within malls are getting reconciled to view these stores as image locations vs the volume locations on the high streets. Brands are willing to spend on these eyeballs. For now.

Inclusive branding tested the waters

They criticised me in their own way this year. There were companies out there who said I was getting too exclusive in my stance.

The brand is essentially an exclusive statement of intent. The brand is about uniqueness. A unique set of consumers buying into a unique and exclusively unifying effort.

Brands from the biggest companies experimented with a contra movement. The inclusive branding movement. It started sometime ago with Surf and its campaign of "Do bucket paani bachana hai". It went on with companies saying the "I, me, myself" movement was an alienating influence, let's get inclusive. And so you had Lifebuoy talking the language of generic health. And every other toothpaste talking the language of generic dental hygiene. The each-one-teach-one campaign will adopt a different stance soon enough. Will it be an "each-one-teach-one-how-to-brush-his-teeth" Colgate campaign? An "each-one-teach-one-how-to-drink-sensibly" campaign of a Seagram's?

`Social ostracism' brands built social plans

Now, there are my cousins in categories such as gutkha, liquor, tobacco and allied segments. These are what I call all the `social ostracism' categories. Some call them the `dark categories.' Categories of branded products that seemingly harm health, but nevertheless deserve a space in the sunlight of the branding movement.

The year 2006 saw every socially-ostracised category company make social plans. Further still, companies progressively insulated their businesses with diverse sets of categories sporting the mother brand.

An ITC used the mother brand in the category of biscuits with success. The ITC e-chaupal movement is another hub for the brand ITC at large. Kingfisher is now not only a brand of water which you could criticise as a surrogate effort and bring under the scanner at times. No one is going to criticise the Kingfisher airline brand as a surrogate, for sure. Insulate your business as you go along, was the tendency of the corporate in the social ostracism category.

Each one of the brands in these categories has its own plans for the social sector. Wait for more of these. The pharmaceutical category, oft criticised for making money on the illness that affects a society, is yet another category that will see monies moving into social causes. Some of it out of its own volition, and some due to the pressure of the government at large.

The `dashaavatar' brand endorsers

The brand endorser made the biggest money this year. A tall, dark, handsome gentleman from Allahabad, all of 64 years of age, baritone voice and "angry young-old man" image in tow, advertised for all of 31 brands across every category there is to remember.

Cricketers of every kind, commentators, coaches, selectors, in fact, everyone associated with cricket in some way or the other (except the ball boy) made similar, promiscuous brand endorsement forays.

In the bargain, the consumer got confused. It was pretty difficult to say whether an M. S. Dhoni was a Clinic guy or a wet-set gel guy.

Marketers got the better of this in their own way. Instead of using one endorser who in any case was advertising 14 different brands, marketers have started picking more than one brand endorser for their brands.

In many ways, this insulates the brand as well. If one brand endorser is indicted in a case of killing a chinkara, the brand has the flexibility of moving on with its other more animal-friendly endorsers.

Further still, the brand benefits from the awareness and like-standards these multiple celebrities command with consumers. A Coke will therefore benefit from the audience that loves an Aamir Khan, just as it will add cumulative positive strokes to itself from audiences that love a local Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam or Tamil star.

Rural branding took more baby steps

Rural became more than a buzzword. Dr C. K. Prahalad has done yeoman service. Marketing folk peeked keenly at the bottom of the pyramid. I disagree with Dr Prahalad, though.

There are really two pyramids out here in India. I build one pyramid that is urban and another that is rural. The urban pyramid is three times smaller than the rural pyramid. On both these pyramids I place the upper income group (UIG), the middle income group (MIG) and the lower income group (LIG). And guess what?

The size of the UIG in rural is possibly 2.2 times as large as the size of the UIG on the urban pyramid. Same goes for the sizes of the MIG and the LIG.

Brands such as HP Gas have gone into the rural hinterland this year with activities that are truly brand-intrusive. HP Gas has realised that penetration of cooking gas in the rural interiors is low. Its community kitchen campaign builds community kitchens in village clusters. Villagers who cannot afford a gas connection at home come in here with their vegetables chopped up and lentils cleaned and ready. Villagers pay for their cooking needs on an hourly basis and chat away with one another as they cook for the day

The effort is cost-effective, saves on bio-fuels that are scarce, creates a community chat session of the real kind, and adds to the branding effort of an HP Gas. What a beauty!

Rural is real for HP Gas. Lots more brands went rural this year in a real manner of speaking, inventing new ways of reaching out to what I lovingly call Real India.

Blog branding and the Online world

Blogs ruled. Brands created online communities that brought the fun consumer-to-consumer branding element into our e-lives. Cadbury's Meethamoments.com and the Sunsilk Gangofgirls.com are classic examples of the way the brand marketer has morphed in her efforts.

In the beginning it was B2B. And then came B2C branding. Today is the day and age of C2C.

More power to the consumer, then!

I can go on and on, painting trend-lines that saw the year 2006 be the marketing year it was. But let's stop here. Let's look forward to a more exciting brand new brand year 2007.

Happy New Year!

(Harish Bijoor is a brand domain specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc)

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