A product is what the factory makes. A brand is what the consumer buys." Account planning guru Stephen King couldnt have put it better. And at the three-day international convention on brand building organised by the southern region of the CII at Chennai, India couldnt have digested it faster.
Indian industrys concerns, as the brand summit highlighted, is shifting from clamouring for protection against global brands to looking at creating global brands. Over 1,000 delegates attended the conference, in which managers of major brands shared their experience backed by rich empirical data and then tried to contextualise their success to the larger economic canvas. The topics covered: what creates brands, brand building through creating a category, brand building in an economy-conscious environment, brand building as a corporate entity, and measuring long-term and short-term effects of brand building.
Particularly interesting was the idea of looking at the brand in terms of real asset, and the British system of valuing the brand and adding it to the balance sheet. Indian managers were exposed to the methodologies of knowing and pleasing the consumer, and also the perils of ignoring brand building. Declared Suresh Krishna, chairman, Sundaram Fasteners: "The good profits recorded by most Indian companies are a mirage and the result of partial opening of the economy. The combination of a noncompetitive environment and profit growth is a heady cocktail for inefficiency that would wipe out the companies once intense competition sets in." Brands are not the creation of advertising but the image of quality, value systems and excellence practiced by the companies, he asserted.
Xerxes Desai of Titan Industries cautioned Indian firms against venturing into the international market without adequate funds as global players often stop at nothing to stall the newcomer from India, including threatening retailers and advertisers in those markets. According to him, the success of the Titan brand strategy hinged on tapping the current concepts of internationalisation of technologies and products, and the emergence of a borderless world. "The Titan brand campaign highlighted the involvement of Indian and Japanese technology,Swiss precision and German engineering in creation of watches for the new world," he said. The convention made it clear that the deep pockets of transnationals (TNCs) cannot guarantee their success, as some big brands like Kelloggs have not been able to bite into the Indian palate. Another area of consensus was that the value of Indian brands was realised by Indian firms only after TNCs began buying out the Indian brands in the post-1991 era for a price much higher than what was till then believed to be the market value. The speakers had much to say about the art of the brand:
