Have you ever given it a thought how brand names like Sony, Pepsi, Microsoft, Nokia, Pizza Hut have become so popular? Do you wonder how they have come up with their names? Brand name has to be unforgettable and closely associated with the product or service a company is offering. Just think, if this was not the case with these brands would they have ever reached the level of popularity they enjoy now. Corporate branding always starts with a name. If you own a law firm the names you can use might sound like this: Brown, Johnson or Smith Law Firm. A clothing company should try to associate the name of the famous designer with its brand name.

Corporate branding starts with the name. But it does not end here. It involves the tag line, the logo as well as the overall company image. Your brand name reflects your corporate identity. Just think, when you think of Pizza the name that comes to your mind is Pizza Hut, when you think of toothpaste, Colgate comes to your mind and computer equals Microsoft and so on. Choosing the perfect name is as important as arranging the money to start up the business.

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“First impression is last impression.” This is very much true with respect to corporate branding. While distributing a business card you should remember how powerful the small piece of paper is. It contains your brand name and logo. Make it simple, so that people can easily remember it. But be creative in the design (not in the shape or size as it will not fit the card file). It will be great if your card has a global appeal. In fact if you target the worldwide market you should consider different culture. People best like the corporate images that are local and global at the same time.

Designing a unique logo is one of the most important corporate branding strategies. Try to make your logo as simple as possible so that people can easily recognize and remember it. Just think, how simple the logo of Pepsi it. Even if you want you can’t forget it. As soon as you see it, Pepsi will come to your mind. However at the same time you need to be creative. If you stick to conservative designs people will soon get bored. The best thing to do is to hire a logo designing firm or a professional logo designer to make your logo simple yet creative and distinctive.

In today’s world Internet being the most powerful marketing tool creating a branded web site is very important. Make your website informative so that people can know about your company profile, its products, price range, customer service and many more. Another important thing to remember is that your site should have relevant images which will make it more attractive for your target audience to visit it.

Corporate branding is not going to happen over night. It will take some time. Be patient and maintain consistency in your brand message. Sooner or later you will get your desired result.

Has your employer brand become a victim of these uncertain times? If you answered yes and your employer brand was mainly tied to your recruitment activities, then trying to convince your organisation as to why employer branding does matter in recessionary times is a tough task!

Your employer brand is undeniably a powerful tool when utilised in recruitment, but what many organisations fail to realise is that it is equally useful as retention tool.

Ask yourself – Are we at risk of losing key talent? The same talent that is accountable for driving productivity and successfully navigating the company through these rough times!

Abandoning your employer brand during recessionary times will prove to be a costly mistake in the long run!

If you have recently cut staff, think for a minute about the approach you took and how your people were treated:

o How will it affect remaining staff?
o How will it affect client relationships?
o How will it affect customer loyalty?
o What will be the impact of loss of knowledge from the company?
o How will it affect your organisation’s ability to re-hire and at what increased cost when the economy recovers?

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Managing your staff during redundancies with integrity and open communication is a must to mitigate damaging your employer brand, but more importantly it is the decent thing to do for the people who have served your organisation. Compare this approach with that of Pacific Brands, the result would have been vastly different if they had been open and engaging in their communication with employees! And I would have continued to purchase Bonds underpants – but no more!

It is not an expensive exercise to reinvigorate or ‘live and breathe’ your employer brand – here are some tips to consider:

* Communication to your people is a must. Employee communication is often the first to get the budget axe, which is back to front to our way of thinking. At present employees are anxious, fearful of losing their jobs and rumours are rife. Frequent communication and two-way leader led meetings are crucial to ‘stamping out’ rumours and refocusing employees on the job at hand. Be Honest, Clear & Consistent with your message!

* Engage CEO’s to cement loyalty. Leaders must be seen and heard in uncertain times, after all this is when they should be earning their 7 figure pay packets! It is that simple, you will be amazed how the ‘mood’ changes after the CEO has done the walk and spoken to the team. Tell the team that the company is in good shape with encouraging prospects. And if not, tell it straight. Get the CEO out of the office and onto the floor!

* Use your employer brand to recruit the best at ‘normalised’ salaries. In most markets now is the best time to invest, if you had the cash! The same is true in the human capital market; you should view the current market slowdown as an opportunity to secure top talent who may now be enticed to move. Be clear about your Employment Value Proposition (EVP) and compelling reasons why they should work for your organisation. Be Proactive and Build for the future Today!

As John Quelch, Professor Harvard Business School has stated “Successful companies do not abandon their marketing strategies in a recession; they adapt them.” The same applies for your employer brand and as many companies will remember from previous recessionary times, it is a long, difficult and costly journey to rebuild a talented workforce.

Hamara Bajaj campaign

Ever since globalization began, marketers have swung from one extreme to another while dealing with the localization vs globalization of marketing communication.

The answer is always the same: the more culturally relevant the marketing communication is, the more efficient it will be. That is in keeping with our own experience: I have heard of and seen most of the characters that feature in the new viral G for Gatorade that is being talked about in the US right now, but because I am an Indian those men and women (whether Serena Williams or Muhammad Ali) carry no emotional cache. There are no lump-in-the-throat moment, no giggles. Similarly, the advertising professional in the US may have heard of Amir Khan, but s/he is unlikely to grin from ear to ear as I did when I watched him as a safari-suit-clad ambassador in the Panch TVC for Coke. “Tumhaare baap kitne the?” Wow!

So the answer is always clear (“the more culturally relevant the marketing communication is, the more efficient it will be”), the question is never. “What is culture?”

One of the shortest, the most meaningful and my favourite answer was provided by Dr Sudhir Kakkar, a renowned Indian sociologist and psychoanalyst: “Culture is shared meaning.”

Since 1995, I have been making presentations to fellow Indians and marketers about India’s oral culture and how it affects everyday life, product development as well as marketing communications even today!
First, a quick note on India’s oral culture. For those who appeared fairly recently on earth, the Indian culture is meant to be at least 5000 years old. And the one noteworthy aspect of this culture is that most of its architecture, dance, music, mathematics, even medicine has been transmitted orally for several thousand years.

The Indian musicians perform without musical sheets: they have committed to memory the ascending and descending notes that define every structure called a raga. Indian maths rarely went wrong because it was transmitted in rhymed Sanskrit, a language whose meaning is independent of syntax!

Most of the truths of Ayurveda, the science of health, were also transmitted through rhymed sentences. My mother had been schooled only until Class 3 in a village, but she calculated things faster than I ever could but she had been made to memorise arithmetic tables of not just 2X2, but 1/4×1/4, 3/4×3/4!

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So far so good! Does this culture express itself in today’s life, in the 21st century or is it just a fancy notion about a romanticized past?

Consider this: one of India’s most successful TV shows is actually a radio show. It is called Antakshari. It involves singing songs that match the last sound of the competitor’s song. “Now that’s a face for radio” was a phrase invented just for these participants (late night, allowing myself some nastiness;-)!)

Consider this: every single global brand of car marketed in India needed to have its horn re-calibrated. The louder the horn, the bigger the car!

Consider this: every single global television brand marketed in India needed to have its sound recalibrated. If the neighbour can’t hear my TV, why have one?

Consider this: On the Indian highway, unless the car in front of you hears you, it will dismiss your car’s image in its rearview mirror as an illusion. That is why, India has the largest collection of trucks that say “Horn OK Please” Well Ok, the OK used to be once upon a time a light that would blink at night to signal to the overtaker that the overtakee had allowed him to overtake on the dark highways of India. But the Horn was essential to certify that the overtaker was real;-)!

Consider this: Most Indians will send a mail or an SMS, and then call you to say they have done so!

Consider this: Every single marketing and advertising ‘slogan’ in India is rhymed. (Except those in English, of course.)

Consider this: All ad agencies in India have writers who write in English and writers who write in other Indian languages. As a Creative Director in advertising for 20 years, I have always had the English writer coming to me and handing over a sheet of paper saying, “KK, what do you think of this?”
I have always had the language writer coming and saying, “KK, listen to this.” Without exception!

Once, I asked my wife, who is a specialist on the INDog, the primitive dingo pariah dog-type, why our pet dogs do not react to the images of cats or birds or other dogs on TV, and she said, “Because they can’t smell them.” Their primary organ is the nose! They might hear them mewing and barking and chirping and get excited but if their noses don’t confirm the data, it is not useful data!

For us Indians, the ear is the primary organ, the eye is not. When Coke came to India first, they ran a TVC that celebrated the colour red. Whoa! The brand name was never uttered! The consumer did not know whether to ask for coke or coca or coca cola! Worse, 60% of the TV sets were B&W! Worse, Coke was distributed not through retail outlets where row upon row of merchandise was displayed but through mom-and-pop shops where you had to go and ask for it.

Lesson One: Therefore “Brand Recall” (ears, therefore how to say the brand name!) was more important than “Brand Recognition” (eyes, therefore how to spot the colour red as opposed to the Pepsi blue).

My most memorable anecdote about branding building and the oral culture in India (I have several, write to me if you need more!) was when I was doing marketing communication for a detergent soap (remember in India, powders, liquids and bars co-exist!) named, hold your collective breaths, 501!
The number 501.

So we decided that on the pack and in other visual media (outdoor, print) we would restrict branding to the English script (the brand name would be written as 501)…but what about media where sound played a part?
Radio and TV? (The internet was not even born before 1988!)
We had to, believe it or not, translate the brand name in the local language!

So on Marathi TV channels the brand name became, “Paach she ek”, In Tamil it became, “Aainati unna…” in Bengali it became, “Paanch sho ak…”

Heard of any other nation where the same brand name is pronounced in twelve different ways?
Naah…so stay tuned;-) for more interesting notes (from an old and ever-delighted observer) on brand building in India and elsewhere!

The continual talk of ‘tough times’, ‘economic hardship’, and a ‘global recession’ is causing many business leaders to be fearful of what lies ahead. One thing that is clear is that we are now living in ‘uncertain times’ and this is requiring business leaders all over the world to apply a ‘different’ kind of thinking to how they approach business issues and decisions.

Business viability is at top of everyone’s agenda. Many businesses urgently have to rethink how to keep the cash flowing to keep their financial position stable. Decision makers should remember one basic truth – the source of your business’s cash flow is your customer base. So how can you nurture and keep your existing customers loyal?

Customer loyalty stems from the relationships you have built with them and is heavily influenced by the daily interactions. Avoid the trap of promoting your brand long before you are capable of delivering promises sounds simple, but is continually overlooked by many companies!

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Faced with financial insecurity and instability, people will seek out brands they feel they can trust. Can you honestly say that you know whether your brand is delivering on your customer expectations in this changing market?

* Do you know what is going on in the lives of your important customers?
* Does your brand offer still resonate with these customers or do you need to innovate your offering to better meet changing preferences?
* Are your competitors demonstrating a better ‘value’ offering causing your customers to switch brands?
* Are your employees in tune with your customer needs?

A comprehensive approach to providing your brand with a health check is to conduct a brand audit. This process evaluates your current position, internally and externally, providing you with valuable insight and knowledge to get your brand strategy back on track.

While your competitors batten down the hatches in response to the current turmoil, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

1. Are you proactively creating a point of difference for your customers?
2. Are you investing in your most important asset, your brand, to ensure your customers are satisfied and secure?
3. Are you resilient enough for the short term and will you be better positioned to prosper in the long term?