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MUMBAI:
Months after Omnicom's buyout of DDB Mudra Group, brand consultancy
Water Interbrand will be renamed Interbrand India from 1 January
2013.
Interbrand
India will come out with Most Valuable Indian Brands list in the
first quarter of next year. This will be in line with what Interbrand
does for naming the best global brands list.
Interbrand
London CEO Graham Hales was in India to make this significant announcement.
After ringing the bell at the Bombay Stock Exchange, he said that
Interbrand India would use the same methodology and analytics that
the Best Global Brands report uses.
Talking
about the Best Global Brands 2012 report, Hales noted that Samsung
broke into the top 10 and had used the Olympics effectively as a
marketing tool. Toyota was back in the top 10, while Amazon’s
value rose by 46 per cent. Coca-Cola has been at the top of the
Global Brand list for a long time.
Hales
singled out Apple’s products which have huge anticipation and
loyalty. "The iphone 5 launch saw people camping outside stores
for three days so that they could be the first users. On the flip
side, companies like Nokia and Blackberry are struggling and need
to get innovation out there. Yahoo! does not have the presence that
it did earlier. Facebook is a new entrant but the coming year will
be more interesting to see what it comes out with and where its
share price is at," he added.
Hales
noted that it is important that a company’s employees feel
engaged and believe in the brand. Otherwise the repercussions could
be negative which is what happened with Goldman Sachs when a former
employee vented out his frustration and wrote a letter.
Godrej has used Interbrand when it decided to make the brand central
to its business strategy. Godrej head Strategic Marketing Group
(SMG) Shireesh Josh said that the aim was to articulate what the
brand stood for. The focus rested on four pillars which were progression
in terms of making better products, empathy in terms of understanding
consumers, expression in terms of letting consumers express themselves
and experience in terms of not just being a physical product. One
of the things done was creating a design architecture which involved
a younger looking logo. Godrej’s employees were also engaged
in terms of which were the leader product categories within the
group and which categories had a smaller role to play.
An
important part of what Godrej does in engaging consumers through
activities like ‘Live Out Your Dreams’ which is for students.
“The result is that share performance has been ahead of share
investment. Buyers of one category of our products are increasingly
buying other categories. The journey of brand Godrej though is not
over. It has started.”
Water Interbrand is headed by chief strategist and head Asish Mishra.
"The team in India has been working extensively with the Interbrand
professionals to learn its processes and about brand creation and
brand management. The toolkits used by Interbrand are strategic.
Apart from this, we will be doing seminars for the corporate to
educate them about brand building," said Mishra.
After
Omnicom's buyout of the Indian advertising agency through its network
agency DDB, the entity was renamed The DDB Mudra Group and an extensive
restructuring took place. As part of this exercise, the strategic
branding and design consultancy Water became the representative
of Omnicom's brand consultancy Interbrand in India.
In
its first three months of operations, Water Interbrand expanded
its client base and the scope of its operations. It added new projects
like PepsiCo GNG brands Quaker and Tropicana, Asian Paints PPG's
corporate branding and environment design, XLRI rebranding, MoneyGram
brand expression, and EMMBI's brand strategy, identity and engagement
assignment.
Mishra
said that the aim is to have three clientele tiers. They are MNCs
that Interbrand already works with on a global basis like Samsung.
The second is Indian companies. The third are entrepreneurs. “The
challenge is that most Indian companies only think of brands as
a name and a logo. We have to change that mindset and dispel that
notion. Our aim will be to create an organisational role for brands.
Our aim is to see that a company’s brand strategy overlaps
with their business strategy. This means that the brand impacts
various departments like HR, R&D. There should be engagement
of brands with organisations. This is how brands create value for
organisations.”
“Our
aim is to create brand centric organisations that create immediate
business value. For this to happen companies will have to change
investments and internal budget allocations.”
He
conceded that during a slowdown companies focus on the short term
and forget about brand building for the long term. "The focus
tends to be on cutting costs and better pricing. The challenge is
that this should not affect drivers that have built a brand. Otherwise
consumers could see a brand negatively," he added.
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