Ramanujam Shridhar, CEO, Brand-Comm

“I think brand-related PR is something that a very few companies can do and this is where we come from. Whether it’s brand consulting, PR or advertising, we come in from the brand’s perspective. That’s our USP.”

Ramanujam Sridhar, a bright B-school graduate from IIM, Bangalore and a post-graduate in Economics from Loyola, Madras, has established his brainchild brand-comm as one of the very few organisations to provide complete consultancy for brand building, corporate communications and advertising. In his successful career, spanning over 18 years, Sridhar has served at several responsible positions like, CEO of Pratibha, Senior Vice President (South) of Mudra, and as Executive Director at R K Swamy/BBDO. As an advertising and media professional, Shridhar has worked with a wide array of brands that includes bigwigs like, BPL, Digital, Van Heusen, Weekender, United Breweries, Birla AT&T, Videocon, Kurl-on, Wrigley and Dalmia Cements.

With his bagful of experience and realisation that brands required more than isolated mass-media advertising, Sridhar launched brand-comm in December 1998 – with the objective to promote an integrated communication approach to brands. His company, brand-comm offers consultancy in the areas of Public Relations, Corporate Branding, Integrated Brand Communication and Personal Branding. In this Dialogue with Shubha Kumble, Shridhar shares his views on the growing acceptance of branding in the country, the emerging conflicts with agencies and lots more.

Q. What do you think are the main issues blocking the acceptance of branding as an important area?

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There is still a lot of uncertainty about what branding is and what it can do. Another issue is that branding, like marketing, is an imprecise science. I have seen a number of highly successful people interchangeably using positioning and personality, which can never happen in any other discipline. Similarly, a lot of top people are still confused as to what branding is all about and it often gets confused with advertising slogans.

Another rather unfortunate factor, which I have noticed since we live in Bangalore, is that software companies often mistake branding with investor relations. Investors form only one segment of their target audience. Their customers, who are mostly based abroad, are another important audience. Third audience is the employee list. Now what happens is that most software companies believe that just because they get mentioned in the pink papers, they have built a brand. By getting mentioned in a business publication, they may have built a brand for the investor, but not for the other segments of their audience. I think we all need to understand that branding means being consistent to a whole lot of target audience.

Another factor is that many companies like Philips Software, for whom we do work, have realised the need for internal branding. Internal communication or branding is something that advertising agencies are not too interested in because there is no revenue here. Ad agencies prefer television commercials that win Cannes and unfortunately branding can be boring as it means being consistent, having a certain identity, having a certain tone of voice. So while there is a lot of interest being generated about branding, it is still surrounded by a lot of haziness.

Q. Has there been any change in the attitude of the client over the years? If so, how do you think this has happened?

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I think what is slowly emerging is the unbundling of communication services. Earlier, a client would go to an agency like HTA or JWT who were the full service agencies as they would do everything like research, do PR, media buying, planning, direct response, client servicing – basically everything. Today a client would say, “Hang on, what is your core competency?” Somebody is strong in creative, someone else in packaging, and so on. So, they choose the agency depending on their specific needs. This is certainly a good development as the client today has clearly evolved from what he was, say 10 years ago. This is indeed a big change that has taken place.

Q. Branding as a concept did not receive much importance even a decade ago. How do you think today it has grown into a factor to reckon with?

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Well, a couple of things have happened, one of them is the influence of MNC brands. This actually caused our people to sit up and take notice. Second factor is the evolving media like yours and coming up of business publications like The Economic Times. Today, for instance, if Interbrand does a brand evaluation study, I think it will get a front-page status. This is an indication that things are changing at a macro level. At the micro level, I think we are still moving from the stage of commodities to brands for many categories. We talk of salt being branded in a big way, as is sugar, so we are still in that stage. In our set up, where we are so used to low quality and inferior products, branding mainly means consistency.

Q. Tell us the story behind brand-comm.

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As our name suggests, we are involved in brands and communications. A lot of us have been in the communications space for a significant period. We were in that stage in our career when we could contribute more to brands than mere communications—and, this was our forte. Advertising in those days was all about providing communications. But, we felt mass media was not the only solution. Half the time, the ad agency, at least in the days when I grew up, was 15 per cent commission and 85 per cent confusion. While today, the commission is no longer there, but the confusion certainly remains. We have often seen clients coming back to complain: Are you making me spend more because your income depends on it? And, I think, to some extent, that was a fair comment.

We banked on our experience to do the planning for this venture. One of our first decisions was to work on a fee-basis instead of any commission so that it was not dependent on what the client spent, but on how much time and efforts we could give him.

Our advertising model, the PR model and the brand-consulting model – all the three spaces we operate in, run on a fee-based system. And, with most of our clients, we work on the basis of a retainer.

What we saw was that most clients speak about one voice. It is a standard line used by most advertising agencies. But we feel that the one-voice concept is actually more about the one invoice. It basically means that while in different divisions of the agency bill, the same message is not carried through whatever they are trying to say. Our company is called Integrated brand-comm. The idea is to see how we could integrate the brand message. This message may not be created by us. If we are handling the PR activity of a client, the message may be given by an ad agency. In that case, they tell us what they are doing and we try to integrate it with various other messages where we are involved.

Q. Tell us about your initiatives towards the branding exercise.

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Let’s pick up Scullers Women. Incidentally the brand was launched without any advertising and only on PR. We did something called a dream design contest. What we had perceived was that women, after buying clothes, generally had a certain point of view – either about the style or the cut or some other aspect. You may look at it as a post-purchase dissidence or treat it like consumer feedback. We got in a number of designers from NIFT and asked our customers to share their views on how they would like their skirt or some other garment to be. Even as they spoke, the designers sketched their ideas. These ideas were put before a panel of designers. If they liked it, a consumer’s inputs could actually be merchandised under their name. Our audience got very excited about this and even the media was attracted towards it. This basically goes to show that if we can give you an idea that will get written by the media, obviously it will make a difference.

Another example, also related to Scullers, is the end of sales that all apparel manufacturers do from time to time. We often wonder if these sales will dilute or discount the brand image. So we came up with a new concept. If the company was committed to giving up to 60 per cent off, we suggested something called a height sale. And, we made the promo like this: we asked the customer to bring a tall girl to shop and get discounts worth her height. This way, a girl who was 5’6’’ got a discount of 56 per cent. The media again picked this up as they thought it was interesting. Our quest has been to look for things like these and many more, which actually enhance the brand value.

Q. What makes brand-comm different from any other PR agency?

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The fact that we come from an advertising space explains that we do not see PR as a mere media relations exercise. I have full respect for PR agencies and I feel many of them are indeed very good in media relations but, unfortunately, very few of them can actually talk about strategy. They keep talking mostly about messaging, but I don’t think they can speak much on positioning. But then again, they come from a fairly different perspective. I think brand-related PR is something that a very few of them can do and this is where we come from. Whether it’s brand consulting, whether it’s PR or advertising, we come in from the brand’s perspective. That’s our USP. Our tagline is smart ideas built with brands. The idea for this lies in the fact that advertising agencies give a lot of ideas, but unfortunately most of these ideas are geared towards either a television commercial or a press ad or something that is designed towards the bill.

Q. Name a few of your clients.

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To name a few, we are working for Scullers, Indigo Nation, Philips Innovation Campus, JobsAhead, Aditi Technologies, CookieMan, My TVS and Pantaloons retail outlets.

Q. As some of your activities overlap with mainstream ad agencies, does it ever lead to a conflict?

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Yes, it does at times. I’ll tell you what the problem is. The issue is we do some advertising on our own. This is mainly because I was in advertising for many years and people know me as a man from the ad world. May be our advertising image is too strong or overpowering and somebody feels threatened; but that’s fine. So, we try to be very careful and maintain the principle that we will not get into execution. We call ourselves as an account-planning agency. We may give you the thought or the idea and, how you execute is entirely for you to decide. I think the real future for us is that we would do less and less execution and more and more of strategy, which we really like. And, this depends on how our branding business develops over the years. So, I think we need to take a call in a year or two about where we are heading.

Q. What kind of growth do you see for yourself?

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The sad part is when the business is showing signs of growth our brand consulting activities are contributing only 20-25 per cent to the revenue. I want it to be somewhere around 60 per cent of the revenue. So, I think we are still scratching the surface and lots of opportunities are still out there. I think that PR and personal branding are areas where we have managed to make some headway. But I would mention, we measure our performance in revenue billings, as we don’t do media.

Unfortunately, the gestation period for most people to understand the value of branding is very long. I made a pitch last year and we finalised the deal last week only. We do a number of workshops and conferences for the generic understanding of branding to improve. But I am pretty bullish about the next year or so.