Brand it right

I am a start-up and want to brand. What must I look out for? What must I focus upon?

Vizag

Kaveri, start-ups are typically strapped for cash. More often than not, most start-ups confuse branding to be a cash-intensive process. Not true. My recommendation for start-ups is to invest in a brand mentor rather than in an advertising agency.

Most start-ups understand their businesses better than anyone else who might be hired to do their business. Therefore, all you need is a brand-mentor. Get one, and insist that your entire effort needs to be vetted forever on the basis of low-cost branding initiatives.

Market-research is indeed the first step. Here I recommend small sample sizes, run by yourself rather than outsourced to a specialist agency. Everything else will follow the insights you gather from market research. Market research helps you build your basics right. And once your basics are right, nothing can really go wrong. Get your brand-mentor to forever hold your little finger and guide at every step then on.

You are a brand guru, what would you say is the most important perspective a brand must have?

New Delhi

Manoj, you are being kind. Being called a guru in this day and age when gurus are up to tricks of every kind is a bit of a double-edged compliment. Therefore, I would rather call myself a brand-evangelist.

Brands are meant to enrich the lives of people. Brands are meant to be solutions. Real solutions to real problems. The moment your brand moves away from this dictum, it is time to re-orient your brand strategy.

If your business owner is, however, inclined to go his way, time to call your friendly head-hunter and re-orient your job-strategy instead.

Brands today are offering solutions that look like solutions, but really aren’t. Time to do an audit on your brand and see if what you are offering as a solution is really one. Is it something you would offer your ailing father as a solution? Is it something you would sell to someone who is investing his last buck on it? Is it something you would sell to this innocent little girl who knows little?

Do the innocence check on your strategy. If you find yourself going berserk selling deodorant that looks like a chick-magnet or offering a television that offers to cure your blood pressure problem, time to re-orient strategy.

Brands at large have a tendency to get carried away by the creative. At times brands swim far away from the basic tone and tenor of their brand proposition statement. At times brands adopt the most desperate measure of saying things they really don’t mean and really don’t represent. Avoid this totally.

Brands are meant to enable lives positively. Not by deceit. Not by subterfuge. And most certainly not by clever lines that hide more than reveal.

The consumer is not an idiot. At the same time, the consumer is not as intelligent as most people imagine him/her to be. Successive small little doses of advertising hyperbole have made urban consumers develop thicker and thicker skins of understanding.

Today, a lot goes, unless specifically pointed out to be a bit too far in its logic. Brands need to understand this and need to correct issues where they have gone a bit too far, and a bit too wrong.

There is a need to do a check on every brand that you manage and handle. Ask the simple question: does it enable lives? And am I communicating this fact adequately with enough integrity? Or have I gone a bit too far? Must I correct this as part of my overall brand strategy?

Harish Bijoor is a business strategy expert and CEO of Harish Bijoor Consults Inc. Mail your questions to >cat.a.lyst@thehindu.co.in

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