question hour. Money-less branding

Money-less branding

I have very little money to spend on branding. Can I embark on the journey at all?

Mangaluru

Shyla, low-money branding is a possibility. You can build a brand with very little money but a lot of effort. You can actually invest sweat instead of money. You can build a brand bottom-up with hard work and passion rather than top-down with money and advertising. We have built many such propositions in India. It takes longer to build a brand, but the brand built without money is that much stronger than the brand built with money. One is more hollow than the other. Or to put it positively, one is stronger than the other. Brands built bottom up are stronger than top-down built brands. So go for it. Don’t abandon the journey even before it has started.

Curd used to be set at home. Now, it is a big brand touted by many companies. How does this happen and work?

Ahmedabad

Rohit, curd is a basic in millions of homes across the world. It is a part of the old diet. A part of the homemade health food category. Curd has many avatars. It has an avatar as food, and as drink. It also lends itself to the spicy, the salty and the sweet variants of use.

As generations get busy, most homemade health foods need an on-the-go avatar to make them more relevant. Keeping this in mind, curd is today an aggressively marketed item. Therefore you have curd, buttermilk, lassi and other probiotic formulations that are marketed.

Value additions that talk the language of purity and nutrition will be market-crackers across towns in curd. Most milk has a pesticide residue. If there is one curd that can stand up and market itself above it all, that is a USP in itself. The future is about safe milk and safe milk-based products. That is a story to use. And that is a story that many marketers will use in the future.

Mehta ji , as we watch the category move, curd needs to be made fun first. Fun must lead and health must follow, maybe even as a shadow that is seldom seen. We will see this happen as well.

Is there something called a foreign brand and an Indian brand in India today?

Kolkata

Jyoti, the foreign brand is no longer foreign. In many ways, brands of overseas parentage and origin are today very much India’s brands. It is important to remember that brand ownership is a ‘consumer ownership’ and not necessarily only a ‘manufacturer ownership’. Therefore, brands such as Levi’s, which will progressively adorn more Indian butts than American ones, sheerly because we boast the world's second largest population, will be as Indian as American. Brands’ origins are blurring fast and furious.

Nestle, for instance, has been in India for 100 years. It is as Indian I guess as any Indian brand on the shelves in terms of consumer perception. Corporate ownership may sit in Vevey in Switzerland, but consumer ownership resides in millions of Indian households from Jhumri Telaiya to Jhabua.

India is a strong brand consumption region. We will soon become the biggest users of Levi’s jeans, just as we will emerge the biggest consumers of a McDonald’s burger in the world. Give us time. Our sheer numbers will do it. Literally by default. And will ownership patterns across geographies define where the brand belongs? That’s a question to ponder upon.

(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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