How important is the branding of leadership? What principles of branding apply to building and promoting leaders? What must budding leaders do if they aspire to be brands?

Let me submit a few thoughts, maybe not earth-shattering or particularly original ones, but hopefully worth considering.

Some of us tend to wax lyrical about the softer or emotional aspects of branding - the look and feel, the sensory factors, the personality of the brand. Without downplaying the value of any of these important factors, in branding one must definitely speak of an even more basic need and that is the need for a brand to be backed by a good product or service and let me now reiterate - that is certainly not negotiable. Similarly, whilst we can wax lyrical about leadership traits and qualities that set leaders apart from the followers we cannot forget the fact that more important is their performance or the results they deliver quarter after quarter. There is a tremendous amount of interest - not only from investors - in successful companies like GE, Toyota, Infosys and Reliance (to name just a few) because of their phenomenal results over the years. The market looks to them for direction, guidance and ensuring that their respective sectors are looked at seriously by analysts, media and key influencers. So here is a question that runs the risk of embarrassing some of us. How good are your results as a leader? Attributes may be silver but results are pure gold in the leadership game.

If you were to really look at successful brands and understand why they are where they are, one thing becomes apparent. Successful brands are consistent. Coke, which has been the world’s most valuable brand for several years now, is the flag-bearer of consistency. It owns the colour red. Remember the 1996 Cricket World Cup and the commercial created for that?

Disney owns family entertainment, Apple stands for innovative products and Jet Airways symbolises professional service. These are the attributes that people recall and remember these brands for.

On to leaders and let’s start with political figures. The instant associations with Winston Churchill will always be his bowler hat, his cigar and obduracy in the face of severe and needless aggression. Can you imagine him dressed any other way? That is what branding is all about.

Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most influential leaders of all time, clearly owned ‘non-violence’. Never mind the fact that what he taught us is being abused by politicians and others who are doing a disservice to the brand that is the Mahatma. Similarly, if one were to look at management thinkers, Tom Peters, whilst he had several credits, is still better known for his work on ‘excellence’. C.K. Prahalad is associated with the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ and Thomas Friedman with a ‘flat world’.

Successful brands have strong associations that are carefully created and nurtured over the years. The better ones have multiple associations. McDonald’s evokes imageries of the golden arches, French fries, value meals and family outings. (It would be interesting to check if the brand evokes the same associations in India.) Microsoft has associations of being a successful enterprise, Windows, rich employees, Bill Gates, billionaire. The association of Titan could well be its advertising’s signature tune, Aamir Khan, the slimmest watch… I am sure you are getting the picture by now.

What about leaders? What associations would come up with relevant target audiences when we say Narayana Murthy or Mukesh Ambani? This is the challenge that leaders need to address.

So what must leaders do?

If leaders are going to make their personal brands stand out, the way forward is simple. They must stand for something. That way you will always have someone for you and someone against you. Better still “own something.” Also having a multi-faceted personality works as it gives you a greater opportunity to be noticed and remembered. This has implications from the perspective of promoting leaders in media. Carefully thought out and well executed public relations strategies can create opportunities for varied associations to be built around the leader. So how good is the business leader’s media relations strategy?

There is a lot of debate whether the world of business needs specialists or generalists. There is a newer point of view that says that today’s complex and diverse world needs those with versatility. But given the current preoccupation with branding in this piece, let us narrow our focus. How do leaders who aspire for leadership position themselves? They must strive to be specialists and let the right audience (read media) know that this particular subject is their area of interest and knowledge.

Can anyone do a story on corporate governance and ethics without talking to N. R. Narayana Murthy? So as leaders who wish to make a bigger mark and we, as budding leaders, need to figure out what we need to be known for and specialise in so that we acquire expert status at least, if not celebrity status.

A lot of the literature and experiences on leadership that we have pertains to managers in Western economies, which are developed. Most of the celebrated leaders that we admire and revere even are from the US. Yet, we do know that a developing (if not booming) economy like ours perhaps needs a different approach to leadership. In fact, many of the much read theories on management owe their thinking and origin to the US and in my view these may have limited relevance here. While I am sure there will be lots of commonalities in traits of leaders, one needs to remember that the cultural outlook towards work and life, may be, and often is, dramatically different. The family seems pretty important in India, as too perhaps the frequency of religious functions! Perhaps the Western leader could be a lot more outward focused than her Indian counterpart. Perhaps the Western leader would be more focused outwards on the investor while in India it could well be internal and on the employee. The skill sets required too might perhaps require a greater reliance on inter-personal skills in India. The point, however, is that the very uniqueness of the circumstances and times that we live in demonstrate the importance of looking at India and the issues that are mentioned in this article in our own context and we cannot merely import something mechanically from the West. So the leader while positioning herself would also take into account the target audience and its expectation from leaders in terms of behaviour, actions and beliefs.

Organisations need leaders, without a doubt. Leaders, while they have some common traits that work across regions and cultures, need to evolve their own style of management that works for them. A style that sets them apart from the host of other leaders that are currently there and delivers actual, measurable results at the market place that gives them visibility to the relevant audiences - customers, employees, investors and opinion makers like the media. Ownership of certain skills and a clearly enunciated specialisation that draws attention to the leader are needed. Leaders cannot be flighty or moody, particularly under duress, so the temperament of the leader becomes critical. One of the features of a successful brand is consistency. A can of Coke has to taste the same everywhere and this is something that leaders who wish to become brands need to keep in mind. Consistency is not only for products but for people as well.

There is a crying need for leadership and most certainly here in India. Employees wish to join companies with visible leaders, investors are more comfortable trusting their hard-earned money with companies led by visible leaders and customers wish to deal with charismatic leaders.

More critically, media is keen to depict leaders and talk about their achievements and multi-faceted interests. It is an exciting time to do business in India and a challenging time to be a leader. Perhaps an even bigger challenge would be becoming a brand. But the rewards can be dramatic. Perhaps it is worthwhile to remember what Marie Curie said, “One never notices what has been done: one can only see what remains to be done.”

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