Kiran Khalap, May 3rd, 2010

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:-)