A Brand is not a Thing; it's a Being
Branding for a Young India

Author and lecturer Winston Fletcher once commented that ‘branding is probably the most important concept that marketing has given to the world’.

Intriguing and complex

Yet the brand and branding has remained one of the most inconsistently understood marketing concepts. I learnt marketing and communications in an era, when most brand managers equated branding with the size of their logo in a magazine ad or the length of logo exposure in a TV commercial and naturally fought with agency art directors to increase the size or prolong the exposure.

In an interesting way, to a lot of marketing practitioners, the youth appear intriguing, puzzling, a bag of contradictions. They are fluid and defy strict definitions. They question authority, yet respect authoritarian figures such as parents. They are experimentative. They are individualistic, yet want to belong. These qualities often make marketing people read the youth as fickle, undecided, disloyal, and unsure of their identity and so on. This is why almost every year seminars and conferences are held on ‘Marketing to the Youth’, people present case studies and successful examples, and yet, few answers are found and we all wait for a similar seminar the next year.

So I find it very interesting that I am writing a guest piece on Branding for the Youth, combining two very powerful topics.

You are what you deliver

So what does branding need to be for the young? To answer that, perhaps we should ask what branding and the brand need to deliver to the young? While brands deliver many things to their customers – from reassurance to trust to aspirational fulfillment to a sense of identity, I would like us to explore what makes youth a special segment.

Do I like you?

Young people are all that we said in the second para of this piece – fluid, experimentative, individualistic, tribal. Plus they are technology friendly, suspicious of politicians, fearless and yet apprehensive, risk friendly, yet not foolhardy. But more than anything else, when I look at youth as a phase, a mindset and young people as a segment, I feel this is the time the search for and exploration of relationships is at its peak. At home, in the neighbourhood, in the school and the college, in their tuition classes, at workplace, at friend’s homes, at weekend outings, in weddings, in the night club, young people are evaluating other people and deciding who is a potential friend and who is not. While the search for relationships will never really end, it is during youth that it really begins and accelerates fast and for the first time, unsupervised.
I believe this is the context in which branding and the brand can effectively engage the young. Sure, brands are about aspiration and identity. But perhaps even more, they are about relationships. Whether physical brands or human beings, we decide to from relationships based on a simple thing – belief. Belief gives us reassurance, makes us proud to associate with someone. Think of the friend in school with whom you hung out, the one with whom you discussed mathematics or the one who came over home when you needed company. Whether in public or in private, it is our belief in people that decides how far we will go with them. I read somewhere that a belief means that there is an internal and external faith in a particular set of values, a trust that the person will deliver that set of values. With trust comes a relationship, as people remain loyal to their friends.

Connecting as people do

It is no different between brands and people. We like people who are a bit like us, whose hobbies, interests, passions match ours. When brands behave like humans, rather than just a name on a pack, and tell us they have the same passions as ours, they begin to become our friends, someone we can hang out with, someone in whose company we can be proud of being seen. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the case of youth. Think of brands such as Nike, Coke, Apple and the relationships they have built with their predominantly young and young-at –heart customers. A resolve to build relationships makes you do a certain kind of things. Again, think of the college days or the first job. You develop a taste in music, movies, books, sports, chocolates, disco’s and all the other things similar to that of the person you are building a relationship with. Brands need to do the same. Seen in this context, why Nokia and Pepsi involve themselves with music, Red Bull goes after alternative sports, AXE does naughty things, become explainable and seem appropriate.

I keep looking for Indian examples and alas, none comes to my mind as well as these global brands. Are home grown brands such as Red Tape, Action shoes, or Killer jeans missing the point? I happen to see it as a great opportunity for them.

Brands and branding are more than the size of the logo. That’s too simplistic a view. A brand to me is no different from a human being, and need to connect with people as people do.

Thank you for your attention.

[Published in the USP Age December 08 Special Issue]