Dharen Chadha, Managing Director, Momentum Strategy Consultants

Dharen Chadha, an MBA from the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute, started his career with Voltas in 1980 and left the company as Marketing Manager - Consumer Products in 1987, joining HTA (JWT) as Director - Strategic Planning. In 1991, he was transferred to JWT, Hong Kong, as Head of Strategic Planning. In 1994, Chadha was appointed Regional Director-in-charge of the Unilever (detergents) and Eastman Kodak businesses across the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan and Australasia. He emerged as the International Vice-President in 1994, Senior Partner in 1995 and Global Planning Director in 1997. Chadha returned to India to set up Momentum Strategy Consultants in 1997.

Speaking to Shubha Kumble of exchange4media, Chadha shares his views on the ever-growing importance of brands, the need for specialty consulting, and lots more. Excerpts:

Q. How has the concept of branding evolved over the years?

One of the key differences we are seeing is that today’s clients have a far greater appreciation of brands. Earlier, it used to be the bells and whistles – some communication hook that was used. But, today, people have realised that it is the reputation capital of the company. At the same time, they sense a gap in the true understanding of what their brand stands for and its key differentiator. They realise that agencies are unable to fill this gap. They realise the need for upstream help and this is where brand-consulting firms come into the picture. Besides communicating to the consumer, companies are also concerned about attracting the right talent to their organisations. The role of a brand has become far more important and even the CEO is getting involved in its development.

Clients have realised that they don’t want their brands to be a commodity. They don’t want to be like anyone else, they want more stable demands for their products with better margins. Along with this, they want respect and reputation. With competition becoming more and more intense, the need to define your difference is becoming even more acute. That’s where a need is felt to do this more thoroughly, more properly and more skillfully. This is why firms like Momentum are becoming specialist firms as we have a strong specialist skill in the area of defining brands.

The future scope of Momentum is entirely dependent on one thing – the rate at which we can train more people. There is no shortage of work in the market. The only constraint on our work, like I said, is the number of people we can train and how much we can leverage. This is a painstaking, slow moving but ongoing process. Investing in our people is our strategy. Building people is the only objective that firms like ours can have.

We at Momentum do a couple of things differently. First, we believe that every aspect of your operation adds to your brand. Your product, pricing, communication, company culture – everything is an asset that contributes to the way your brand image is built. With this belief, it makes absolute sense to not only involve the marketing department of a company but every one of them. Our methodology to that extent is very inclusive. By getting everyone involved, there is an ownership to the end strategy, which makes sure that it gets implemented. The other thing that we believe in is getting our hands really dirty – we don’t follow the armchair consulting model. We try and get as much into the client’s business as possible, do a whole lot of fieldwork and are essentially a hands-on team.

Besides this, we don’t consider any of our assignments a success unless it has offered some tangible benefit to our client. So, unless it results in greater sales, greater profitability, higher margins, it really isn’t a successful consulting case. We therefore have a partnership-oriented approach. We hold moral accountability for our work. In this sense, we are very different from an agency. They have a stake in what the client spends and we have a stake in what the client earns.

Advertising is an industry that has rewarded me immensely, but the problem is that it is not being practised the way it used to be. It is being increasingly commoditised with long-term plans being taken over by short-time bottomline concerns. The industry as such has disinvested in research and some of them are now realising the mistake. If agencies are waking up, then it’s surely a welcome trend. The issue to keep in mind is that their relationship with the client is account-based while a consulting firm like ours maintains a project-based relationship. I personally hold the view that instead of creating a new division, agencies should invest in their own strategic development. Then again, a lot of time and funds go into training strategic talent. Whether an agency is ready to do that to the full extent is a question. On the other hand, a client today is not being given the quality time he deserves. Investing time on your clients is extremely important. Perhaps the agency should re-look its strategy on that front.

We’ve worked with a number of brands like Unilevers, Asian Paints, MTR, BP, De Beers, Hutchison Whampoa, Courvoisier, SmithKline Beecham, ITC, Reebok, Ariel, Coca-Cola, Braun, Carlsberg, among others. We worked on the strategy for Asian Paints, which resulted in some cult campaigns like the Sunil Babu one and the ‘Har ghar kuch kehta hai’. We helped them with their positioning and said that the one thing anyone painting his home is looking for is radiance. It might be expressed differently in different parts of the country, but the essence is the same. Going back to the brand’s core values, we formed a link saying it offers enduring radiance and looks that last. We also helped them come up with the Home Solutions idea. Through several interactions with customers, we noted that while they didn’t have any problem with the quality of the paint itself, they found the whole process a big hassle. This is when we came up with the idea of offering help in the form of Home Solutions in 2001. Today, of course, our competitors have also latched on to the idea and there are a number of brands that offer the same service. But Asian Paints was the first and the most successful. Next comes Bharat Petroleum. We were entrusted with the responsibility of developing the brand architecture for the retail side of their business. Again, after discussions with consumers, we learnt that the biggest problem they faced with petrol pumps was the lack of purity. We realised that there is no point in adding frills to their retail outlets like a quick mart, etc., if we don’t tackle this problem first. This is when we came up with the ‘Pure for Sure’ positioning. The campaign that went along was pretty interesting. We convinced the company to recognise the 90-odd dealers that were regarded as honest and sincere. This was of course controversial as it implied that the other BP pumps were not up to the mark. But the company decided to go with it and the campaign was received very well and rubbed off very well on the brand. From the first 90, the number of dealers included in the ‘Pure for Sure’ club has risen to 2000; so more and more dealers are coming around voluntarily.

MTR is one of our latest assignments. We helped them with their positioning and brand imaging and built a strategy to convert it into the Indian version of McDonalds.

As industries break down, you would find one day that you are competing with someone who the next day is a partner. Lines are blurring and this is bound to happen. When we first started out, a lot of our work was done for agencies – we worked for Reebok and Ariel. Then we realised that agencies could not afford our work. We also found that clients were telling us that they didn’t even look forward to the agency to do that kind of work. Even as they liked their agency and wanted the relationship to continue, clients realised that there are certain things that the agency was good at, like the creative side of the business, and they should stick to that. So, we were brought in by the clients.

In such a scenario, some agencies took it sportingly and there were others that felt threatened. One way or another, it is not the agency that decides today, but the client. It’s a classic industry breakdown situation and the dust has settled down. Everyone is more or less comfortable with the new arrangement, but of course, there will be minor issues that will come up but that’s not much of a problem. We’ve worked with Lowe, O&M and a host of other agencies and we have done a great job.