What is the real goal and core purpose of a brand?

Hyderabad

Pranitha, the purpose of a brand is consumer-connect. Brands perennially aspire to connect at the emotional level with consumers. Consumers are the basic building blocks of brands. Brands earn consumer goodwill and connect, one consumer at a time.

The secret sauce in this quest is consumer understanding. Brands need to understand consumers at every possible level. At the level of physical need and want, and very importantly at the level of emotional desire and aspiration. Brands that understand consumers deep and hard do better at establishing an emotional connect with them. The secret sauce is really in distilling consumer understanding enough to be able to emote with the customer deep enough to make a connect.

India has very few home-grown brands. Why?

Ahmedabad

Jayesh, not really. The brands are many. Possibly they are all not as popular as a Patanjali Ayurved offering today.

Home-grown brands have typically been limited by product offering that is at times very local in terms of taste and appreciation, and at times by ambition. While the latter is being addressed today with a whole clutch of private equity players emerging to be catalysts of expansion, the former is always a glass ceiling to break.

Home-grown brands across categories have waited at times for generations before expressing the desire for a pan-India play, leave alone a global play. As generations of management change, ambitions are also scaling up. Add to it the current situation when a fair bit of money is on the lookout for good scalable ideas, and we have a situation which is challenging the old mindset of the home-grown brand that has flourished only in its immediate geography of tried and tested competence.

Corporate honchos tweet. Are there dos and don’ts here?

Chandigarh

Ravi, CEO tweets are an open link to the CEO. Something that did not exist in the old days.

Active tweeting makes you fallible. If you don’t expose yourself, no one can touch you. If you do, everyone can. The new-age CEO needs to expose and invite people to touch you and your enterprise. That’s being new and that’s being real and alive in the digital world.

Entrepreneurs are today able to network with similar ideas and similar folk via Twitter. Twitter can be a rich and quick source of networking with the right ideas, the right money and the right people. In right measure.

In terms of dos, the trick is in being alive and real. Investors love real people. They have seen far too many fancy PPTs made by fancy people with fancy ideas. Consumers love real people as well. CEOs have somehow been opaque and distant in the past. Twitter eases that.

Tweets make the CEO real, touchy and feely. Consumers love the power to be in touch with the CEO direct 1:1. Twitter is a 1:1 medium. A powerful medium that empowers the common man altogether. It is a medium that disintermediates fast and quick. It removes layers between the consumer and the CEO. Use it well.

Harish Bijoor is a brand strategy expert and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc. Mail your queries to cat.a.lyst@thehindu.co.in

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