litmosi™ provides a snapshot of the lack of alignment or the gap between corporate values and their actual practice. It also diagnoses the gaps between CEO and employees. It even suggests solutions!

But why is alignment between walk and talk so critical? Because over 90% of organizations  that are born do not survive beyond the first five years of their lives! One of the keys to longevity of organizations as corporate brands is the sharing of values by the employees of that organisation.

Secondly, in the 21st century, the power of communication lies with all stakeholders: enabling them to share knowledge of corporate brands. This makes the gap between walk and talk evident to all.

Last, the fight for market share is now the same as the fight for talent share. Talent travels globally and joins corporate brands that have a well-articulated value system.

litmosi™ is ideal for CEOs whose organizations have outgrown their “human footprint”. They are no longer in touch with every employee in a fast-growing or decentralized structure. CEOs can customize the tool by prioritizing the values and beliefs out of the universal nine identified by chlorophyll. It guides the CEO through three easy stages, allowing them to invite as many as 50 employees to participate.

chlorophyll created litmosi™ on the basis of one decade of hands-on brand consulting, plus analysis of field research of 50 corporate brands plus desk research on Fortune 500 company values and beliefs.

chlorophyll’s knowledge of corporate branding has arisen through doing and not through theorizing.

Some of the brands that worked with chlorophyll’s copyrighted methodologies to discover their brand constructs include Avendus, BSE, CG, Edelweiss, Glenmark, Hindustan Unilever,  Infosys,  J&J, Merck, Pepsico, Tata Power, Tata Teleservices and TCI.

I don’t know what is happening in your markets, but here, in India, ‘brand’ and ‘branding’ have become the new diseases of the uninitiated in marketing (I must admit that the so-called initiated are to blame too!).

The first symptom of this viral infection is blurred vision: it causes the afflicted person to mistake a brand name for a brand.

The blurred vision then spreads to the brain, causing fogginess on the one hand and extreme obstinacy on the other. This marketing head now insists that every single product or activity or service offering have a new brand name.

There is a bank here in India (Syndicate Bank) that has over thirty different sub-brand names for its loan products! Some are in English, some in Sanksrit, some in Hindi; some have a prefix (Synd), others don’t.

When I saw this, I asked myself: what does this achieve? Does this strengthen brand recall or weaken it?

Does it reduce the now-truncated brand name to a pedestrian prefix…and by implication, reduce a rich concept called the brand to the same prefix?

On the HSBC Bank site on the other hand, there are three sub-brands but the brand name is always HSBC.

There are other symptoms of this viral infection…but more on them later.

For the moment, let me know if ‘overbranding’ can indeed kill a brand…and your suggestions on how not to spread the infection:-)

Kiran Khalap, 26th April, 2010

The word brand has been used since Roman times, and means the same thing in over 13 of the oldest European languages including Frisian…and yet, it is about to get a new meaning in India.

On April 26, 2010, the Unique Identification Authority of India (uidai.gov.in), led by the man (Nandan Nilekani) who is credited with having invented the phrase ‘Flat World’, launched a brand name and logo that could, if all goes well, stand for the biggest, hairiest, audacious-est brand in the history of mankind and brands.

“What a pompous claim!” I hear you say.

No, not pompous; and not a claim.

The brand’s intention is to grant an identity number to 1.2 billion Indians (based on biometrics), ensure it can be validated all over India, and thus start a revolution that equalises opportunity in a civilisation and a culture where, for a majority of people, identity is a foregone conclusion predetermined by caste, class, family, community, village…here is a sharp, simple, scalpel comprising sixteen digits that can cut the Gordian knot and free the individual to rise to her highest potential.

Please join the revolution…start by watching the launch video from link Brand Aadhar above; then visit the web site, and end by offering your help!

This evening, Ambika Soni, Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Union Cabinet, India, was being interviewed on TV.

She admitted that she was not in favour of censorship of TV programmes, but that TV content producers needed to exercise restraint since most homes in India were single TV homes. Which means the entire family could watch one programme at a time: selective viewing, say, a sports channel by the adolescent son and a soap opera by the mom, was not a possibility.

To me, this was deja vu with a small twist in the size! Because it reminded me of the state of Indian cinema till a decade ago: because single screen theatres were entertainment destinations for the entire family, pan-Indian cinema stuck to a formula. The formula included stories that catered to a safe, traditional sense of morality, sprinkled liberally with slapstick comedy moments and exotic, not-within-reach locations.

Today, the multiplex theatres have given birth to a totally different kind of cinema: one that can connect to smaller focussed audiences (by experimenting with ‘risky’ themes and bolder execution styles) or can continue to serve the ’safer’ larger audiences. Look at Love Sex aur Dhoka at one end and Three Idiots at the other.

Does that mean Indian TV content is fated to wallow in the lachrymose waters of antediluvian themes…until a majority of homes start owning ‘multiple TV screens’?

Or will TV content break its shackles by becoming easily available on another screen that is totally individualised…a screen called the mobile phone (500 million and counting!)?

What do you think?

Semantically speaking, there is no such thing as a sunrise. That would happen if the we lived in a geocentric instead of a heliocentric universe. (On June 22, 1633, a Vatican Inquisition passed down judgment on Galileo Galilei for suggesting that the earth rotated around the sun;-))

It’s a word that merely confirms that human habits die hard: the logically correct word for sunrise word could be sunsight. (If you have more options, please do mail them to me!)

But why worry about the Vatican and humanity in general when professional communicators make the same errors? Today, let’s look at India, the nation that adopted English as its language of commerce in the 18th century and its uneasy co-existence with 22 other languages recognised by the government. It’s an accepted fact that languages that survive are the one that are most plastic and inclusive.  The observations below are not about inclusiveness but about habits and hangovers.

1. Professional Indian English writers are the only ones in the world to use ‘up to’ as one word. You will find the error from the lowest-brow ads of both multinational as well as local brands, right up to the high-brow headlines of the Times of India and the Hindustan Times.

2. Indian advertising copywriters are the only ones in the world to use a slash and a dash after a figure that refers to a price, as if they are writing a bank cheque…even at the cost of the figure being misread. Eg: You could easily mistake Rs 111/- for Rs 1117, right?

3. Professional communicators in India always ‘cope up’ rather than just cope. So they cope up with stress…but merely cope with incorrect prepositions;-)

4. Indian advertising copywriters working for the Petroleum Conservation  Research Association have spent millions of rupees educating the general public about the virtues of saving ‘oil’ (rather than petrol or diesel).  As far as the general public is concerned that word refers to cooking oil.  What a waste!

5. Most of the regions in India experience riots and violence over the over-usage of English and the non-usage of the local language. So you would expect no spelling errors of common words in local languages: yet all the State Government milk booths under the brand name Aarey in Mumbai refer to milk as ‘dudh’ instead of the correct ‘doodh’. (Imagine spelling ‘seen’ as ‘sin’!).
The same government has distributed stencils for slogans about saving electricity, where the Marathi word for electricity is spelt ‘vij’ as against the grammatically correct ‘veej’. Again, thankfully, no ‘riotous indignation’ by the self-professed guardians of the language.

Do you have your own favourite list of ‘hangover’ words? Do pass them on!

I have loved cars ever since I can remember. Maybe even before I started school. Way before I started working to earn a living. Decades before I joined chlorophyll (a brand consultancy in India).

I did all the things one should do, collect posters, models, die-cast models from Matchbox and followed some of the brands that made the fastest cars, even dreaming that one day I’d have one in my garage. (you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one!)

Naturally, Porsche made the list. Particularly the 911 (it is a favorite even today) (and you always say nine eleven not nine one one

And I remember loving the Porsche TV ad…when a kid walks in to a showroom to check out the new 911, which he is then allowed to sit in, even recall his eyes sneaking up behind the steering! There was that glee and excitement in his eyes!

It’s an iconic ad of sorts, I am sure most of you would have seen it, but here it is anyways.

Porsche 911 clip

Porsche 911 clip

A few weeks back, VW launched an aggressive campaign to support their India launch. One of the TV commercials has a similar theme, a kid walks in, is shown all the models and when they will fit in to his life, ending with his father finding him at the showroom (all the characters seem soooo artificial). Have a look at the TVC here.

There is no doubt once you see both these ads, that they share the same lineage (more so with VW and Porsche now being part of the same group).

But riddle me this.

Why would Porsche (or VW) allow another VW ad to take this route?

Being inspired by the original is one thing, but how do you justify this?!

To me its like the killing of a cult. 

Application without much attention to appropriateness is one of the indications that an idea has become a meme.

 For example, the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. There was a context in which Dr. Prahalad used the term, but now it is applied quite cheerfully, wherever the poor gather. Or ‘subprime crisis’. A phrase that is used without knowing the difference between a collateralised debt obligation and an earthworm. Marketing gurus have contributed their bit too. Some terms that have come up for much use and abuse recently are ‘customer engagement’ and ‘involvement’.

 And marketers of all stripes ponder how to get people to ‘engage’ and ‘interact’ with their brand.

 Now, I love my ketchups and sauces as much as the next punter but truth be told, I have no desire to ‘interact’ with a bottle of tabasco, beyond pouring the stuff onto french fries. Similarly many people will carefully choose the iron they buy, but do they want to ‘engage’ meaningfully with their Morphy Richards?

 I suspect that we have happily adopted terms that were invented for the click world, and tried to resettle them in alien, brick soil. A critical difference that is forgotten is that for a MySpace or a Hulu, the website is itself the consumer offering. Whereas for a snack you eat or a shampoo you use, the website is at best an accompaniment or surrogate for the product.

 Let us not forget also, that the online world grew on the back of a ‘business model’, that in the absence of stratospheric valuations, could have been called asinine. The principle was simple: “we will give away everything in the store free, and make money from advertising on the shop sign”.

 Obviously then, if the numbers of eyeballs were what you were offering to the advertiser, you had to figure out ways to get them to ‘engage’ and ‘interact’ in a sticky manner with whatever was happening on your site. Because no audience, no advertisers.

 In this ‘charitable’ scenario interactivity and engagement became critical differentiators, since for every Yahoo! there emerged a Google and for every MySpace, a Facebook, fighting for the same optic spheroids.

The power of the buzz around the terms is high, and all marketers want them. Regardless of the fact that there are fundamental differences between product categories, the roles they play in the lives of customers, and therefore, the degree to which customers want to be involved with specific products.

 Motorbikes as a category for example is hugely personal and motorbikes are a lot more than a transportation utility. Thus the degree of ‘engagement’ that a serious biker wants with the world of biking is high. Likewise travel. So it makes sense for Lonely Planet to create the ‘Thorn Tree’.

 On the other hand, no matter how hard you try, it is unlikely that vast numbers of prospects (other than deviants who we shall not discuss here) wish to ‘engage’ with a bottle of carbonated beverage. So it is worth asking what was achieved by Coke in India thanks to the online enjoyment zone created by the brand.

 Similarly, giving people an opportunity to participate in an online poll may give them something to pass time, but how many of them changed to your mobile service thanks to this polling?

 Or whether the Lipton Yellow Label jigsaw puzzle participants have now become devotees of the beverage.

 One more dimension that I think gets lost in the hoopla is the likelihood that ‘free participation’ will appeal most to a juvenile mindset, and you are less likely to find a 35-year old spending time jiggling a jigsaw. It therefore seems to me that we need is to be a little less ‘engaged’ with this idea of providing diversion and entertainment to people blindly, and focus on what is really being achieving for the brand, given its target group.

 And perhaps most importantly, to ask, as an agency head once asked his worldwide client Chairman, “advertising and communication is very good, but how about making better products?”

 That is the most effective way to get ‘stickiness’. A feature that is otherwise, most commendable only if one is selling an adhesive.

The new age overwhelms us with numbers. And Nandan Nilekani is soon going to give each of us a unique one that we can call our own! Numbers crowd our life.
Consider a businessperson: he is expected to know ROCE, EPS, EBITDA, and other numbers that encapsulate the health of his business.
A business journalist has to be au fait with stockmarket indices, the WPI, changes in GDP and so on.

Mr Average Kumar keeps track of his Net worth, his CTC, his credit card limit, etc.
Even the nymphet concerned with her nymphaliciousness has to keep track of calories consumed, weight, Body Mass Index, and how close she is to the magical ‘size zero.’
This fascination with the quantified view of civilisation, is not surprisingly, a recurring motif in advertising and media too.

And yet, I am amazed at the number of people who flaunt their number-numbness as a badge, drawing a spurious association between quantitative illiteracy (innumeracy) and creativity (“I’m an art person you know, I just can’t understand numbers” is supposed to convey that being numerically challenged is automatic proof of genius in the artistic field!)

I suspect it is this proud innumeracy that allows the widespread misuse and abuse of numbers and statistics.
The most common culprit is probably the “misleading multiplier.” Shampoos that make your hair “two times stronger”, products that are “50% more effective” and so on. No one asks: ‘compared to what?’

The answer if you look hard and have a microscope handy, is available in a caveat at the bottom of the TV screen.

The arithmetic though, gets positively mind-boggling when the numbers move from ‘more’ to ‘less’. As in hair-fall preventive products that leave “five times less hair” on the comb. What is “five times less”?! If there were 10 hair on the comb earlier, and now there are only 2, is that “five times less”? (10 divided by 2). That would be 80% less … on the other hand “five times” equals 500% … one is left scratching one’s head (no doubt causing “three times” more hair fall!)

Journalists lost for words
Less excusable are journalists who report survey findings, blissfully unaware that surveys are based on a sample. And that critical to interpreting the findings of a survey is the definition of the sample.
Recent newspaper articles cheerfully celebrated the extent to which the internet has penetrated the circulatory system of 12-18 year old school children, as shown in a survey about internet usage, conducted by a technology company. However the articles left me with more questions than answers.
- Were the students in the survey representative of ALL school students? From which schools were they picked?
- Were these students those who had computers at home? With 24-hour internet access at home?
- Did the other aspects of their profile match those of the total student community? (Eg their parents’ income, education and profession?)
I wrote to the journalists seeking clarifications. I haven’t heard from them.

Time lapse and other lapses
Another example: The recency effect in advertising posits that more recent exposure is recalled better. But surely, temporal amnesia is dangerous in understanding business?
Here are Interbrand’s valuations in billion USD, of three of the ‘World’s most valuable brands’ in 2008 (changes from 2007 year in brackets)

Coke: 2008 value: 66.7 ( plus 2%)

IBM: 2008 value: 59.0 (plus 3%)

GE: 2008 value: 53.1 (plus 3%)

They apear to have done about equally well. However, see how your inference about these brands would change if we compared the 2008 numbers with the 2003 numbers, rather than only for 2007.

Coke: minus 5.3%; IBM: plus 14%; GE: plus 26%

Not quite so equal are they? And surely understanding business requires a better perspective than one’s view of films, where you forget last year’s hits in favour of last week’s releases?

But unless people begin to believe that it is important to understand numbers, what they reveal - and equally, their limitations - they will continue to be taken in by “false numerology.” And one-third of the world will continue to have no idea about what the other 56% think!

Americans are delightfully simple. For instance, if they are convinced about a concept or a line of thinking, they’ll say, “I’ll buy that!”
The language of commerce - a willingness to pay - being the definitive proof of acceptance!
However, for some time now, marketers have been in denial about this fundamental axiom.
“Give it away free” has been a popular business model backed VC, PE and other acronymous sources, staring at teenaged geeks bursting with pimples and ideas.
The notion being that someone else (read advertisers) would pay for a product being consumed by others.

The media (print, TV, social, antisocial, whatever), succeeded for several decades. But in the process, they have created a monster.
A consumer who – like a farmer buying fertilizer – now expects purchases to be subsidized. This ‘freeloading’ attitude is why people get their knickers in a knot when asked to pay more, whether it is to watch the antics of pre-pubescent brides or post-pubescent cricketers.
The expectation from subsidies however, grows rapidly. Once fertilizer is subsidized, one expects the seeds to be subsidized. And power charges… and diesel… you get it.
“The price I pay is my acknowledgement of value”
‘Price’ should be the agreement on value between buyer and seller, but consumers now expect some ‘invisible benefactor’ to pick up some or all of the tab.
Consider email. What’s the worth of the email or chat service you say you love?
Rs. 15 / day? (one bottle of drinking water?)
Rs. 20 / week? (one McDonald’s Happy Menu meal?)
Rs. 300 /month? (one home delivered pizza?)
I’ve asked dozens of people and almost no one is ready to pay anything at all for web-based services. They’d rather switch to another free service.

How many unpaid Limewire downloads do you have on your computer?
Do we ever wonder who pays when we take off into the skype, so to say?
Would you limit the number of results delivered if you were charged ‘per result’ for search?

Undifferentiation via borrowed glory
However, the potentially fatal threat to branding is the number of marketers who seem to accept that ‘price’ itself is a gaseous notion, uncoupled from perceptions of value delivered.
Because it’s not just consumers who are freeloaders. So too are marketers.
PC manufacturers allowed themselves to become undifferentiated when they cheerfully backed Windows and gleefully embraced ‘Intel Inside’, as Intel picked up part of the advertising tab.
Result? Most PCs became little more than boxes with ‘Wintel’ inside.
Non-stick cookware brands buried their differences under ‘Teflon’, when most brands started making Teflon (a Du Pont property) their main claim to fame.

Commodities pretending to be brands?
Supposedly, one of the key metrics of brand equity is, “the premium a brand commands”
So how come Coca Cola, long revered by Interbrand, if not Indian consumers, can’t command any price premium over its competitors?
Conversely, one of the most critical pieces of evidence that Harley-Davidson is a great brand, is the fact that people are willing to pay a lot more for it than for a ‘commonplace motorcycle’.
Likewise, your conviction that the Gucci name has great cachet shows when you pay hundreds of times more for it than for a handbag on Linking Road.

A product that only sells at a price identical to that of its substitute products used to be called a ‘commodity’.
But maybe I’m just old fashioned.
“Me-too… but I have a bigger advertising budget”
It gets worse.
Does the world really need dozens ‘ayurvedic shampoos’? Or readymade shirts? Or whatever.
But marketers of even completely me-too products seem to feel that with a celebrity any brand can differentiated. So every Sunny Deol flexing his equipment in a Lux Cozi banian, competes with a Sunjay Dutt parading his pectorals in a Rupa banian!

Similarly, while the already-almost-forgotten Olympic boxer puts on his gloves for one insurance company, Tendulkar bats another.
Do people really follow sport stars into a bank? Do you?
And how many of us rushed out to get a BSNL connection after watching Deepika Padukone’s bizarre imitation of a classical dancer on a Kerala house-boat?

Aah, but marketers seem to buy the story.

Most of us have seen that regions shown as part of India in maps published by the Government of India, are shown as parts of Pakistan, or China or merely ‘disputed’, in other maps.
Clearly, both sets of maps cannot be correct… and the map is not necessarily the territory. In fact often, one knows that the map does NOT reflect the territory.
The problem however, is that often the lack of congruence is forgotten and decision makers focus on the map, not the territory.

Such confusion is also common in the marketing and branding landscape.

Testing advertising
Consider pre-tests for commercials. The industry has created various models of how advertising works. The models assume that consumers receive, process and respond to advertising in a certain way. This ‘map’ becomes the basis of creating pre-testing methods for ads.
The key thing is that the pre-tests measure the performance of an ad with reference to these metrics.
Over a period of time, the metrics gain a life of their own, become the bell that triggers the salivary glands of the Pavlovian ad-creator. And unfortunately, the people who write the scripts start writing for the test.
The ‘map’ that was initially created as a surrogate for the territory, becomes an end in itself, and eclipses the territory.

You do the math
The same problem gets multiplied (if one may use a mathematical pun) in exercises using spreadsheets.
Take the drive towards ‘aggressive targets’. I remember a marketer involved in the launch of an international beverage brand telling me a story about how this can make things go awry. The international marketing head of the company was not happy with the sales targets worked out by the Indian JV, and wanted them to be “more ambitious”. He suggested increasing the targeted per capita consumption target from ‘n’ to ‘n plus 1’.
My friend said, “I don’t think the guy realized that with a casual change in one cell of the spreadsheet, he was adding a billion bottles for us to sell each year!”
But on the ‘map’ it must have looked so simple and logical – unhampered as it was with the heat and dust of the marketplace.

Differentiation on paper
The other big danger of confusing the paper reality with the real article is that we see differences –and differentiation – magnified manifold.
When concepts are tested, they often are couched in language that is consciously and one-sidedly complimentary to the concept. For instance let’s look at a concept for a new product to a consumer, say about “a new shampoo with the goodness of natural herbs that will stop hair fall and keep your hair looking great”.
Now, this is a no-brainer in its obvious appeal. So the research will show a high “willingness to try” this product. Ignoring the territorial truth that there are perhaps a few dozen products offering exactly the same cocktail! And while the concept may get high scores, it really doesn’t have much of a chance in the real world.

Valuation
The paper-mirage is of course at its finest in the valuation game. The facts of the case, if one only were to step back for a moment, would clearly show that several business ideas have NO hope of ever making money. (One good test of this, which often seems to be ignored, is this simple question: Will anyone ever pay anything for this thingybob?)
And yet the businesses attract high valuations. One can only see this as a Ponzi scheme where hope lies in the expectation that one can pass this hot potato into someone else’s hands.

Provability and Truth
There is a truth articulated by the renowned mathematician Kurt Godel that offers a way to see things more clearly.
Godel’s first Incompleteness Theorem states that, “for any consistent… formal theory… there is an (arithmetical) statement that is true but not provable in the theory”.
In short that there are truths that are obvious, but are not ‘provable’.
But you know that in your gut, right? Now if only we didn’t let the ‘maps’ guide us into the valley of death.