In our previous edition (July 2014), we had given our readers a sneak preview into the content that was gathered from speakers on Day One, at the Brand Owners’ Summit, co-organised by The Smart CEO and afaqs!in Bengaluru. It covered some wonderful anecdotes on marketing strategy and tactics, as narrated by industry stalwarts in the IT, healthcare and social entrepreneurship sectors. In this edition, we’ve collated many more valuable branding lessons from Day Two, which saw a healthy mix of speakers from the healthcare, e-commerce, IT and brand consulting sectors.
But, before we proceed, let’s relook at the three interesting branding observations that we’d made earlier.
Krishnakumar Natarajan, founder, CEO and managing director of Mindtree spoke at length about how brands are like people. Brands change and evolve over time, just as people do and a large part of his talk focused on how brands have to be nurtured, grown, just like we do with people.
Krishnan Ganesh, serial entrepreneur and the man behind TutorVista, BigBasket and now Portea Medical, talked about how social media and the digital world has significantly shortened the time taken to build a brand. He gave examples of how two startups, redBus and BigBasket, built a successful brand (at least in specific communities) in less than five years.
Madan Padaki, another serial entrepreneur and current CEO of Head Held High, a social entrepreneurship venture, talked about how simple decisions like naming a company, play an important role in the overall brand journey.
In fact, after we co-organised the Brand Owners’ Summit in Chennai, in October 2013, the common consensus among our editorial team was that we should create a special book on branding and marketing, just based on the inputs and anecdotes we’ve gathered from the speakers at the summit. Here’s why.
The cover of our November 2013 edition highlighted three aspects– Brand Performance, Brand Humility and Brand Character. We listed these as crucial triggers of startup brand building. After the Bangalore edition, we added three more – Brand Differentiation, Brand Vision (the long-term goal of a brand) and Brand Hope (what the brand hopes to do for its customers, whether it is communicating this well and whether it is delivering on its hope) – to the list, as depicted by the info-graphic on the left.
As we continue to organise more such events where CEOs and marketers come together, I am sure we’ll have this wonderful collection of branding lessons, that’ll result in a Branding Bible of sorts. We believe that branding is about the coming together of many, many different characteristics. It cannot be restricted to a list of 10 or 20 or even a 100. Over time, we hope to create such a specialised media property focused on branding – purely based on observations from some of India’s leading CEOs. For now, we’ve shared five wonderfully narrated pieces that is sure to give you a perspective on adding a few more dimensions to your own company’s brand. Here’s to some wonderful brand building lessons from Bengaluru. We hope you enjoy the read.
(If you’d like a copy of the previous edition, which carries these stories in-depth, write to us at subscribe@smartmediagroup.in)
