Author name: Shubranshu Singh

There has been a rapid globalisation of demand and an ongoing expansion of brand turf across industries. As a result, one area of brand thinking has become exaggerated in scope and practice. I am referring to the emphasis on consistency, sameness and immutability. My area of interest is brand sociology. In sociological terms, continuity beats consistency. I concede that consistency is the bedrock of a brand’s promise in so far as it relates to expected, reliable performance. But, it needn’t imply being unchanging or immutable. Consistency is not about absolute predictability. It is indisputable that branding, in the social sense, is created by the chemistry between consumers and creators of culture. There are several storytellers such as the consumers themselves, the company, idea mavens, media channels, critics and influencers. Put together, their output leads to a unified idea of a brand. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] A brand’s reason to be, what it does ,and how it communicates it, shapes a brand’s sense of continuity. It must be able to provide for a wide margin of change, adaptation and ongoing evolution. Fixation is not a formula for surviving. It is definitely not a prescription for thriving. Porsche 911, Mini Cooper and Land Rover—these three iconic automotive brands have preserved continuity while evolving through the years. One has to appreciate the it in the Porsche 911—be it the silhouette, proportions, design philosophy, rear engine placement—all of this has been kept intact to convey a lineage and a DNA that is evidently manifest. At auto shows, through its advertisements and via cooperation of hundreds of adorer clubs, Porsche 911 has made its position ‘rare but accessible’. It is high-performance, yet usable in every day urban living. It is deeply traditional, yet regarded as cutting-edge and innovative. Its engineering has transformed, still the design authenticity is uncorrupted. The exclusivity it enjoys is uncompromised by its growing presence. It is true that brands can be forces of disruption that shift entire generations of consumers to rethink their criteria and beliefs all over again. Apple did it. Tesla is doing so. But it is rare. Truth be told, there is no static idea of the past. The consumer’s active life span is say, five decades. A generation changes every decade or two. The collective and individual process of brand experience is a relay race. No two generation of consumers experience the brand in the same way. As we engage with a brand, our relationship and associations develop all the time. This keeps getting upgraded or downgraded throughout our life cycle as a consumer. At different points in time we pay greater attention and accord greater importance to one or the other set of criteria. Anyone who lived in India before economic liberalisation will understand what “imported brands” or “export quality” meant back then. That is no more the case. Smoking has become largely unacceptable whilst drinking has gained social acceptance. Social media has become the first purveyor of brands. As consumers, we are surrounded by clutter and flashy new news. We seek solidity, anchoring, familiarity. Yet, we also hanker for newness, surprise and enhanced performance A brand that doesn’t evolve, mutate and develop variations in an adaptive sense loses out in terms of functional performance. It erodes perceived differentiation. It also fails to sensitively delight its customers. On the other hand, a brand that changes constantly is unable to establish what it stands for or what its customers should believe in. Novelty by itself is not differentiation. Constancy by itself is not virtue. An obsession with the past matters nothing to consumers if it defeats innovation. Brand owners must neither idolise demand nor glorify design mindlessly. Cultural resistance to change and the inertia that comes from success is a real managerial challenge in brand building. The best way to stay connected with the source of meaningful brand evolution is to be rooted within the customer community. Brands that are close to their respective tribes manage to synthesise the influences from diverse, key stakeholders. Success in the marketplace is an ongoing engagement that allows the brand to flower and emerge to its true potential. “Brands are consistent because they adapt and provide continuity. When you start off as a new brand, you have nothing to lose. When you are at the top, the only competition is yourself” https://www.forbesindia.com/blog/marketing-and-branding/continuity-more-than-consistency-is-the-hallmark-of-great-brands/

“Civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge we do not possess” -Fredrich Hayek Brand reputation is an ‘opinion of opinions’. It is ultimately an informational derivation. A brand must confront itself with the reality of how others perceive it. A connected digital world provides access and limitless opportunities to build and use reputation. To do this, a ‘cognitive approach’ is needed for processing reputational feedback. In academic circles this is called the ‘Epistemology of reputation’. It is a critical area for a brand’s evolution. It concerns the mapping and circulation of information. It foretells the construction of social norm. It deciphers what it is that elevates a brand to being a cultural icon. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] A brand can be an undifferentiated trademark or a cultural icon. When it ascends to higher ground, it defines social norm, constitutes cultural capital and signals ‘taste’. But, what is that thing we call good taste? How do we judge it? Immanuel Kant said taste is an acquired disposition to discriminate and appraise. Acquiring taste as a discriminatory ability cannot be tutored through cognitive sciences. We need experts, tags, labels and rating systems in order to acquire a capacity for discrimination. We may know about good taste from those who know better. When we first come into contact with any new information in unknown domains, our access to facts is limited to the opinions and preferences of others. Inevitably, we rely on word of (relevant) mouth. We look for somebody who knows more about the subject than we do. Of course, new communication technologies have made it very easy for any novice to venture into new domains of knowledge. There are armies of ‘Google gurus’ peddling second hand knowledge. Nevertheless, this is a fundamental and paradigmatic shift in our relationship with knowledge. The more the information, the more the mass of confusion. The more the vested interest, the greater the polarisation and bias injected into the information architecture. Resultantly, there is a ‘heuristics overload’. Brands gain value because they represent a judgement on information that has been sifted, graded, evaluated and commented upon by millions of others. The reputation of a brand therefore is the summative outcome of collective intelligence about the brand and category. It holds a form of knowledge on which we have to rely even when it is processed by others. The way in which the authority of this knowledge is constructed and amplified by brand owners gives us the confidence to swallow it even though it represents a somewhat biased judgement of many others. That’s what luxury does best. Ensure swell reviews by the cognoscenti and popular opinion be damned. The World Wide Web represents a disruptive and radical transformation in our access of knowledge. Because information retrieval systems using search algorithms are based on ranking of information, the web has forever changed the forms, domains and ways in which objects of knowledge are constructed, stored and retrieved. Today, socially decentralised information can achieve intelligent results and therefore the very idea of collective intelligence has entered a new phase. This knowledge is not sitting in some red leather bound encyclopaedia. It is in every interaction from Google searches, Wikipedia entries, e-commerce transactions to the likes /dislikes on a social network. All of it represents a genuine collective intelligence system. Many leading thinkers Shoshana Zuboff, Tim Wu, James Suriwiecki have defended the liberty to produce, unearth, distribute content in unregulated ways. But there are weighty implications for how different designs for capturing collective wisdom may result in different outcomes. The positives of such collectivist judgement include a diversity of opinions, the independence to input and obvious decentralisation. The worrisome negatives potentially include commercial engineering of information, injection of motivated bias and an uneven results architecture. Let us move to an important area of establishing a reputation in matters of taste and aesthetic preference. Which test is reliable? What, if any, can be objective standards in matter of aesthetics? For the beginners, it is easier to take the path to trusting a known authority. Usually such choices in important matters gets inculcated at a younger age. However there are categories where we find adult novices—art, political ideology, real estate, wine and fine dining. As the famous French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has shown such tastes are often shaped by one’s social context. Nevertheless, novices also learn to discriminate by accessing information, classification systems, values and procedures employed to authenticate their developing impressions. Disturbingly, expertise developed via open source is usually dwarfed expertise. Anthropologist Marie Douglas in her book ‘How Institutions Think’ has pointed out that classification systems tend to be subjected to an irresistible pressure towards simplification. So while the actual market conditions are becoming more complex and differentiation is growing, the outcomes in terms of information processing are becoming simpler, perhaps dumber. This is also how human civilisation grew. A social or cultural tradition is firstly a labelling system distinguishing those who are insiders from those who are outsiders. What is most important is that we should ensure that the collective tools remain open and democratic and improve innovative and accessible ways of selecting knowledge. Culture industries spawn guide books, magazine commentators and influencers. David Hume wrote a famous essay ‘Of the standard of Taste’ where he argued that we need a principle, a rule that allows us to discriminate between good and bad taste. Clearly, in his mind, a true judge is a connoisseur who is competent to make a reasoned judgement and also communicate this to others. To him taste is a delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison and rid of all prejudice. This is, alas, not the way of the internet. Truly, in some cases, less is more and more is less. https://www.forbesindia.com/blog/marketing-and-branding/brand-reputation-and-the-unmeasured-world-of-good-taste/

To say that we live in a world of brands is to state the obvious. Recently, the 2020 Interbrand ‘Best Global Brands’ valuation list was announced with the 100 brands at a summative total brand value of $2 trillion. The IPO of Chinese fintech player ant alone drew applications worth $2 trillion. These staggering figures brought brand value and its financial valuation into sharp focus. A brand is an expression of identity.  Brands serve as powerful markers to help consumers express values, display status and generate social personality. Consumers use their interaction with the brand to identify with others and gain admission to a community. [siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget] Seen from a business lens, branding is a strategic approach and not merely a select set of activities. It is key to creating and maintaining competitive advantage. A brand’s strategy must address key components of value creation such as reputation value, relationship value, experiential value and above all symbolic or cultural value. The economic merit of a brand lies in its reputation and esteem. The sociological basis for a brand’s valuation is as a trust mechanism. In cognitive terms, a brand serves as a heuristic frame. In popular culture, a brand is a story and a symbol. All add to a brand’s inherent value. Brand valuations are going through the roof because it is recognised more than ever before that a brand culture acts as a framework for consumption. The mental ‘metabolic rate’ required for branded consumption has become higher than ever before. Overloaded with information, in a 24/7 world, consumers have become ‘cognitive misers’. Consumers don’t merely buy brands, they ‘buy into brands’. Brand strength helps a business generate cash flows and sustainably grow profits over the longer term. I believe brand custodians should obsess about creating value not valuation. Nevertheless, this list has significance. Interbrand is used as an industry wide reference for brand valuation. The reported brand value factors in business performance, financial outcomes in terms of economic profit , role of brand in purchase decisions and loyalty criteria such as clarity, commitment, protection, responsiveness, authenticity, relevance ,differentiation, consistency, presence and understanding. 2020 is a historic turning point that will create an unprecedented shift in our way of living. We must see the brand valuation list with a microscope in one eye and a telescope in the other. Lives, businesses and brands have all been impacted and the world has changed forever. Many brands have benefited from the tailwinds, whereas for others it has been a devastating catastrophe. What can the Interbrand list tell us about the present and the future? Expectedly, ‘digital first’ brands came top of the list. The research period this year – 1 July 2019 to 30 June 2020 – covered the period of the pandemic related online surge. It’s not that Covid airdropped the world into the digital age. But, it accelerated to warp speed the lifestyle migration that was already happening. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Samsung are now the 5 most valuable brands in the world, in that order. The gains made by these brands dwarfs the others in the list of top 100 brands. The total value of the top 100 brands has actually gone up by 9% compared to last year. Leaving aside everything else in their business just the brand value is at a staggering $2 Trillion. A clutch of brands from allied industries like logistics, e-commerce, and payments have gained in value as they were positively brought to the fore due to the Covid disruption. One important trend deserves mention. It is about concentration of value. The ‘winner takes all’ phenomenon shows up. The top ten brands account for 50% of the total brand value of the top 100 this year. America leads the way with 7 out of the top 10 brands! In fact the 4 of the top 5 brands are from the United States. What’s mind boggling is that the top 3 brands make up for 30% of the total brand value of the top 100 brands ,up from 16% in 2010 ! On the other side of this crisis, Covid-19’s most enduring legacy will not be face masks, sanitizers or social distancing, but the end of permanence as a standard.  We shall now expect disruption as part of normality. Can brands give us strength and direction in a world that is truly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous? With an aggregate value exceeding 2 trillion dollars, there can be no doubt that these power brands move the interconnected global economy. They will play a role in providing solutions to many problems faced by humanity. Brands will matter more in the future. It pains me to see that not even one of the top 100 brands is from India. Our talent leads many of these global brands and corporations but – as Indian brands – we are just not there. India cannot become a developed economy with underdeveloped brands. It should concern us all. It must become a national mission. https://www.forbesindia.com/blog/marketing-and-branding/how-important-is-a-brands-valuation/