The Hindu Business Line : <I>Start a good brand with a lasting legend </I>

To connect with your potential customer it is not just one message that helps. You need seven, says Patrick Hanlon in Primal Branding, from Simon & Schuster (www.simonsays.com) .

The primal code is "a construct of seven assets," viz. creation story, creed, icons, rituals, pagans, sacred words, and leader.

Brands are belief systems, and the seven pieces of code construct a belief system, says Hanlon. Because, believing is belonging. "When you are able to create brands that people believe in, you also create groups of people who feel that they belong."

Begin, therefore, with the creation story. It tells people where you come from, "whether the story is about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their parents' garage creating the first personal computers, Jeff Bezos sitting in the backseat of his car writing the business plan for amazon.com," or about "two college kids who created Google in their dorm room".

A lasting tale is of "IBM's evolution from a business supply company to a keypunch card company and ultimately into a business information and technology company."

Closer home, www.tata.com narrates in the `milestones' section: "1868: Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata starts a private trading firm, laying the foundation of the Tata Group."

And www.sclindia.com, the site of Semiconductor Complex Ltd, informs that SCL was set up in 1983, "in the green, unpolluted environs on the outskirts of Chandigarh - a city designed by the French architect Le Corbusier." No mention of the 1989 fire, though.

Well, Hanlon's second point is creed, or core principles. It is "the singular notion that you want people to believe in."

He cites, as example, Singapore Zoo's creed: "To be a world-class leisure attraction striving to provide excellent exhibits of animals displayed in their natural environments, for the purpose of recreation, education and conservation."

Volvo's creed is `to design and produce the world's safest automobiles', while Starbucks' creed is to `the third place' (because the other two are home and office!).

Clicking around, you'd note that Wipro (www.wipro.com) has the colourful flower on top of `Applying Thought'. Accenture (www.accenture.com) states, `High performance. Delivered,' while Infosys (www.infosys.com) says, `Improve your odds with Infosys predictability.'

Third come the icons, such as "the Nike swoosh, the Apple start-up `bong', the sound of the Pentium gliss," causing spontaneous resonance.

"Whether the icons are visual, sound bites, smell, or some other form, they are sensory imprints that instantly summon the brand essence." Intel's `musical signature' is "one of the most ubiquitous music icons ever, heard about every five minutes somewhere in the world."

Logos and packaging too can be powerfully iconic.

"Those who manufacture and market DVDs, CD-ROMs, and other software understand that while the disk is elemental, it's the box that surrounds the disk that supplies on-shelf sizzle."

For instance, "Packaging for the iPod U2 Special Edition 20GB was a square cube many times the dimension of the iPod it held - and sold for $50 more."

Fourth are the rituals. These are "the repeated interactions that people have with your enterprise."

An interesting example is of Philips Medical, the world leader in medical diagnostic imaging equipment.

"Philips began turning the impersonal ritual of getting a CAT scan, MRI, or X-ray into patient-friendly participation," by working on design to move `from machines to experience'. How? "Using Philips lighting and consumer electronics, children can choose from preselected environments like nature, water themes, even outer space. They can also select their own music and what move to watch." Then? "When the child is supposed to hold his breath, the on-screen space alien holds its breath and encourages the child to do likewise."

A code you can't do without!

Turn coders into good programmers

With four decades of experience behind him, Abbas K. Sutarwala shares his wisdom in Good Programming: Skills and Practices, from Tata McGraw-Hill (www.tatamcgrawhill.com) . "Software development is yet to become an engineering discipline, with attributes of engineering like maintainability, interoperability, ruggedness, extensibility, and conformance to well laid out standards," writes F.C. Kohli in his Foreword to the book.

He foresees that software development will use a greater dose of mathematics, systems engineering, and concurrent engineering.

The Preface reflects on the run-of-the-mill programming landscape, characterised by the `software factory' approach, with coders at work.

"Schedule pressures are translated to working longer hours as if creativity is linearly proportional to the number of working hours. Quality is managed by `after-the-fact' reviews. For every 50 exhortations to `deliver faster' there is, typically only one exhortation to deliver `defect-free' code, and none to write `elegant' code," rues Sutarwala.

To remedy the situation, he works on the following themes in his book: "Incremental development, effective and early testing, early feedback, simplicity, paying attention to detail, developing expertise, effective collaboration, and enjoying programming."

Begin, therefore, with a chapter on `test-driven development', to learn how to reduce defects and improve code design, without losing productivity. Unlike as in the traditional UTC (unit test complete) development, here, you'd prepare small tests before coding, develop only as much code as is required to pass one successive test at a time, pass all prior tests with each increment of code, and improve the design at each step. The author explains the different stages through `a simple medical insurance premium calculation feature in Java'.

The chapter on `improving understandability' begins with a quote of Albert Einstein: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."

And Sutarwala's maturity and depth of skill show in the simple style he adopts to explain abstract concepts.

For example, his tips to make programs understandable are eminently understandable: "Follow standards, give meaningful names, keep the simplest interface possible, include decision tables where appropriate, parenthesise to clarify, provide up-to-date test cases to explain functionality, and comment judiciously."

Don't miss his lessons in chapters that deal with code correctness, adaptability, and reusability. The book also discusses `programming as on-the-job learning', and offers an introduction to XP (extreme programming).

A book that can make good programmers better.

Tailpiece

"I've been searching for a song to load on to my iPod."

"Which one?"

"Appadi Pod-u Pod-u... "

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in