The Brand Called "YOU"

The Brand Called "YOU"
"A product is something that is made in a factory; a brand is something that is bought by a customer. A product can be copied by a competitor; a brand is unique. A product can be quickly outdated; a successful brand is timeless" – Stephen King, WPP Group.
Since pre-industrial times, branding has been used to develop strong, enduring relationship with customers. Today, albeit on a larger, more global scale, branding continues to provide those same benefits. Automobile products from Maruti Udyog Ltd are differentiated from other competing market offerings by its promise of wider reach and trouble-free performance. Mcdonald’s stands for fun and cleanliness. Sahara Parivar is for national cause and patriotism.
But branding is not just confined for corporate groups or products any more. In the new millennium, everything is a brand. Hyderabad is ‘Cyber City’, Mumbai is ‘Corporate Hub of India’, Delhi is ‘India’s Power Centre’ and ‘Operation Desert Strom’ is a branded military operation. Big B, Dhirubhai Ambani, Sonia Gandhi and Sachin Tendulkar. Brand! Brand! Brand! That is right, branding is for people, too.
Personal branding is essential to professional success today. Gone are the days where your value as an employee or vendor was linked to your loyalty and seniority. Today, companies are in a constant state of reorganization in response to the rapidly changing demands of the market. This modifies the way you respond as employees or vendors. On a constant basis, you are working with different project teams, managers and employees. In a sense, you are functioning like your own personal corporations. And that means that you have the need to brand yourself out of the clutter and build demands for your services among the target markets.
‘Personal branding’ vis-à-vis ‘Corporate or Product branding’
• In business, a brand is a perception or emotion maintained by a buyer or a prospective buyer, describing the experience related to doing business with an organization or consuming its products or services.
Your brand in a personal context is a perception or emotion, maintained somebody other than you, describes the total experience of having a relation with you.
• The principles and techniques of brand management only works when the relationship meets the real needs of people with whom those organizations do business: customers, shareholders, employees, other stakeholders and community at large.
The essence of personal branding is a function of the breadth and depth of your relationship in the personal context: You want your family, your friends, your employer and your co-workers to truly understand and fully acknowledge who you are and what you do.
• Brand is not meant to create a unique imagery that does not offer any clear tangible or intangible benefits to its consumer and the firm.
Likewise, personal branding is not about building a special image for the outside world; it is about understanding your unique combination of rational and emotional attributes – your strengths, skills, values and passions – and using these attributes to differentiate and position yourself to guide your career decisions.
Personal branding needs to be carried out through a very well articulated campaign to make it a successful exercise. There are three important steps to successful personal branding.
• Be Distinctive: - To truly understand what it means to be distinctive is to learn that it implies much more than just being different. It results from understanding the needs of others, wanting to meet those needs and aligning your competencies to do so while staying true to your values. Whether you choose to highlight your education, an aspect of your personal trait or a soft skill, depth of your network, or your expertise in a facet of finance, pick something that sets you apart from others and occupy a distinctive slot in the minds of your prospects.
• Be Relevant: - Being distinctive is not the only thing that matters to someone else. What you stand for needs to be relevant. Relevance begins when a person believes that you understand and care about what is important to them. It gains strength every time you demonstrate that what is important to them is important to you. The synergistic effect of being both distinctive and relevant is what ignites the power of a personal brand.
All strong brands evolve with the times to remain relevant to their target audience. This could mean the line extensions (like Maruti offers ‘true value’ exchange offer for your used cars while you are purchasing the new one). It could be modifying the ways you communicate your brand (moving from a printed resume to a resume on CD or ‘your personal website’). It could mean augmenting brand attributes as continue to grow in your career (like increasing the depth of your professional expertise that would result in the ‘value addition’ to your profile).
• Be Consistent: - The third component of building a strong brand is consistency – doing things that are both distinctive and relevant, and doing them again and again. Consistency is the hallmark of all strong brands. As a brand, you only get ‘credit’ (acknowledgement, acceptance or recognition by others) for what you do consistently. Consistent behaviors define your brand more clearly and concisely than most polished and practiced spiel.
Just as with corporate brands, your personal brand is your promise of value. It separates you from your peers, your colleagues, and your competitors. And it allows you to expand your success. Whether you are a senior executive, the president of your own business or an employee of a company of any size, managing your brand is critical to achieving your professional goal. After all, in a world where cities, wars, sportsmen, CEOs, politician and highways are branded, you need to think about yourself in the same terms.

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Kids influencers nooooo, market by themselves!

Kids are no longer influencers, but a market by themselves!

Technology boom and media proliferation, a young new genre of audience has marked its presence in the maturing consumer demography. Yes, we are talking about kids, the new generation brand evangelists. Market estimate reveals kids spend an estimated $4.2 billion annually on their personal purchases. The approximate market size influenced by children is $100 billion causing many millions of purchases among their parents.Interestingly kids have matured from persistent nagging to importance nagging, in what is recognized as ‘pester power’. This appeals to parents’ desire to provide the best for their children. This combined with parental guilt plays the critical role in spending decisions, as time-stressed parents tend to substitute material goods for time spent with their kids. So kids, from just being influencers, have now become ‘active consultants’ and ‘information provider’ to parents on most household purchase decisions. This change can be attributed to the conventional and new-age media consumption habits of kids and their increasing comfort levels with modern technology. Resultant effect: 63% of kids are involved in a spectrum of product categories from clothes to bicycles to computers and cars. Mobile phones get 76% involvement while cars enjoy 43% of kids’ involvement. Parents believe that their children do research and express opinions about product categories.
Since all marketers more or less agree that Kids are an important fragment of their target audience if not their audience in totality, schools provide the most relevant concentration of this audience in an almost perfect synergy of possibilities. It delivers a captive youth audience and implies the endorsement of teachers and the educational system. Marketers and activation agencies have been quick to realize the power of theschool environment for promoting their brand and products. What’s more the school contact program is no longer the novelty it was a decade ago. However there is a downside to having an intelligent and informed audience, the “gatekeepers segment” with parents and teachers which cannot be alienated in the communication process. This has resulted in a clear cut variable in measurability of a program in direct proportion its infotainment quotient. A recently concluded study finds that babies as young as six months of age can form mental images of corporate logos and mascots. Brand loyalties can be established as early as age two, and by the time children head off to school most can recognize hundreds of brand logos. Research also shows that close to 90% of kids within 8-12 years of age prefer to act in a group than on their own. About half of them feel enormous pressure to wear the “right” brands. It’s hardly surprising that a whopping 90% of kids’ brand decisions are heavily influenced by their peers, worldwide. In planning a successful activation for kids, identifying kid’s icons and what interests them becomes imperative. Most of us when planning the activation fail to ensure that it has the answers to a few relevant questions. Is the activation engaging for the kids? Is the gratification going to excite them? Is the communication going to capture gatekeepers’ interests? Is it going to breeze through their lives with little impact or will it capture their interest and tickle their imagination? If the answers to these questions are yes, then we have on our hands a successful activation which can draw long term benefit for the brand.
The ideal mix of all these must haves combined with an in-depth understanding of the target audience psychology, as well as the integration with mass media, can be seen with the activation for a leading 2 wheeler company for its brand of scooterettes, Scooty. The objective was to increase awareness and consideration in a region where the category itself was still growing. The target audience was primarily girls aged between 15-19 years (the end users) and parents who were the purchasers. A dipstick with the TG brought to the forefront a few critical insights.
a.
The product purchase is primarily utility driven – purchased for the teenager when she requires mobility for school, tuitions, etc. and the male members of the family cannot accompany her to such destinations.
b.
The topic of proximity for these young adults as well as all relevant gatekeepers is one of Career. It is the highlight of all relevant conversation and thus a common link.
c.
In emerging India there is a gap in the information flowing to the Kids and the perception of their parents. In context it means that the child is exposed to a lot of “non-traditional” career options like the media industry, or advertising where as the parents still perceive the likes of medicine and engineering to be more or less the only acceptable options. Here in lay the disconnect, as well the opportunity.
The Brand Scooty positions itself as the “medium to freedom” -- the freedom from relying on others, the freedom for “Her” to go to college on her own, to plan more into her education days, to expands her horizons every day. Small freedoms add up to much more -- the freedom to dream outside the confines of traditional choices. This formed the basis to develop the Below the line campaign SCOOTY AAGEY BADHO which was an integration of various mediums as multipliers like Print, Out of Home, Electronic and PR. This was combined with a Cause “Promoting Higher Education for the Girl child” completed the communication content.
The school contact program used the simple medium of an essay in which the kids were to express their choice of career and why they believed the choice befitted them. The activation was supplemented by career booklets which have information on the top 10 career options. The selected entries went through a group discussion followed by a one on one interview with the judges. 32 girls won themselves a scholarship. Mass media was innovatively integrated. Women achievers and celebrities, including IAS Officers, Bollywood actors, mountaineers and politicians, gave their views & vignettes on the importance of education for the girl child in print and electronic media were used. These capsules were branded by Scooty Aagey Badho. As opinion leaders drew attention to the program, there was increased receptiveness from the gatekeepers. 6.5 lac girls were reached out to and 2.5 lac kids participated.
The results of the activation were measured by TNS India where in B category towns the reach in target group (daughters) increased by 833%, and the percentage of people that associated the brand with the communication increased by 950%.What contributed maximum to the success of the activation? Mainly that in its conception it answered the critical questions and in its plan there was an in-depth understanding of the target audience psychographic. It offers the best bet to pull off a market driver integrating the infotainment basics and building a communication strategy around a relevant subject, which ensures that marketing objectives can be well met through such activations.