Making the right call

Dipika Pallikal has sued Axis Bank for a debit card transaction gone wrong in Rotterdam in 2011. Does it hurt the bank’s brand equity?

- Preiti Garg, Mumbai

Preiti, most definitely yes. This is bad news for Axis Bank.

Being dragged into a negative controversy is bad for brands. It focuses attention on bad performance. What such incidents result in is a concerted attention on the negatives of the brand rather than its carefully cultivated positives.

The moment a consumer reads about this complaint, the first thought is to focus on your own experience with brand Axis Bank. You will very quickly recall every negative experience you may have personally had with the brand, and that is enough to sully it. Such incidents evoke a quick recall of even buried cases. That is bad for the brand in question.

At the second rung, one recalls bad service and bad responses from not only Axis Bank, but every bank there is. To an extent, such instances, raked by prominent sportspersons or celebrities, is really bad for the brand. The rallying-together effect of the distraught consumer is what comes into play.

Axis Bank needs to get its act right, and reply right to the complainant. There is a need to be transparent, non-defensive and real in such cases of high-decibel consumer complaints.

Big brands have fallen and bigger brands are falling all the while. How come iconic brands cannot remain iconic forever?

- Rohit P. Bansal, Dehradun

Rohit, brands are like human beings. They are born, they grow, they flourish and live, and then they die. And eventually decay.

The iconic brands of our life follow a similar pattern. They are born simple, they are vested with greatness by consumer franchise and brand love, and then they eventually die, having outlasted either utility or image. Both important aspects of a brand at large.

Brands can, however, re-invent themselves continually to stay relevant to the generations they cater to. Brands, therefore, cannot age with their customers. Brands need to be perennially young. If you age with your customers, you die with your customers. If you are perennially static at an age group, you will be perennially relevant to the new generation of consumers that consume you. Brands need to, therefore, invest in being relevant, original and innovative all the time. Brands that fail to do this, die.

Look at brand Reader’s Digest. Reader’s Digest remained what it was. RD believed that the biggest strength of a brand is being consistent and static. This was its mistake. Readers morphed, but the Reader’s Digest did not. In the end, RD became a grandfather brand while its readers were brand new grandchildren.

Tourism brands are told to hold potential. What’s your take on India in this?

- Shalina Murthy, Hyderabad.

Shalina, tourism is a big lure. And there are certainly many, many kinds to market. There is country tourism, religious tourism, medical tourism, sex tourism, and more. Let’s take religious toursim. The potential is big as far as India is concerned. This is big for internal and external traffic alike. Locations such as Tirupati, Vaishno Devi, Haridwar and as many as 216 other identified locations are big lures.

You need to be cautious, though. You must not milk the cow more than it must be. I do believe marketers have tapped them as much as they are allowed to. In many locations, being too overt in your marketing ways to tap potential can be objected to. When every fan in the temple looks branded, and eventually when you want the priest to be wearing a branded dhoti as well, you are going too far. Don’t!

I run a micro-brewery. What is the potential for hand-crafted beer in India?

- Sunny Singh, New Delhi.

Sunny, hand-crafted beer is going to be a rage in India. All across the big eight cities and all across our mini-metros as well!

Expect lots of competition in this space. I do believe there is space for every one. Each of these craft-beers, through the micro-brewery route, have the potential of expanding the market at the quality end. If that end of the market does not develop, beer will remain the basic commodity it is, for decades more. If you ask me, most beer brands that think they are a brand are nothing more than quasi-brands that sell 99 per cent for their commodity orientation and 1 per cent for their brand orientation. If you do a keen audit on the brand of beer you make and sell, you might be dragged down many notches of self-esteem as your brand scores reveal a lot more than they hide.

Indian beer is a demand-supply game. Everyone is besotted with running their units full steam. Everyone is keen to cater to summer demand. Everyone is keen to either make their own beers or competing labels. The idea is to keep their factories running. This is short-termism at play. Long-term thinking in the category is missing in most small units.

Harish Bijoor is a business strategy specialist and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc. askharishbijoor@gmail.com

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