Its all about Loving

What makes a brand ionic …do the brands that have garnered status of being ionic over years and years have something in common?

I believe yes they have, they have all changed with time. They have gone with the flow of changing business environment and mostly importantly consumers. They have been able to establish a, emotional connect with generations and generations of consumers, some have been part and parcel or our day to day life while some have gained the status of being aspirational,Symbol of ultimate achievement.

Coming on to how to define an ionic brand they can be defined in following way’s(these have been compiled from an article from ET, by the present CEO of JWT)

• One that excludes an experience that goes beyond product features and benefits
• That has been able to create deep cultural roots
• That has gone beyond cultural boundaries and has adapted to local cultures
• Possesses symbolic features that makes it increasingly recognizable
• That possesses physical or semantic features that make it increasingly recognizable.
• 
  

The article also mentioned the most important brands, human brands that have an ever lasting impression and are easy to retain, recognize.

Feeling is essential for brands in the Pyramid of customer based brand equity it’s ultimately the performance and image of brand leading to Judgement and Feeling.

The brand that comes to my mind when I say ionic is Cadbury , it’s a brand that I have loved for all the reasons , good taste , emotional connect….i have literally grown up with this brand and my love for this brand has not abated an inch in all these years …..I still hog on the chocolates ….i still love having one in my fridge all the time and its still my ‘preferred brand’ when it comes for chocolates.

I remember when every summer vacations my dad use to fill my backpack with the best chocolates available and I always compared them with cad that i had back home in india and honestly,nothing tasted better than it .Be it diary milk , Bourneville, Celebrations I hog them all.

Now here see the word that I use ‘love’ so for me an ionic brand would be something I love something I can define myself, i can relate to with and I can say Cadbury is one such brand..i loved the advertisement that they have shown through all these years, their tag lines…..”kuch meetha ho jaye”, “kuch baat hai zindagi mein” (though there were some forgettable ones too)and they had a huge impact on my liking of a brand .. As a child when I had absolutely no taste of chocolates…….. ..i saw this add of girl of having a bite from something in a purple wrapper and then was dancing like mad and hugging a guy(very cute one!!)…curiously I asked my elder sister what that gal was eating and she (my sis) introduced me to the enchanting world of delicious chocolates and its was not just any chocolate it was the same one that I saw in a purple /golden wrapper that I came to know as Cadbury

The taste of chocolates has remained all the same through these years and that makes them more endearing…..they have added new variations all of which have maintained its legacy …

So I guess this all sums up why I am so much connected to the brand after all these years…but do they justify it to be ionic is still debatable !!

Ciao

Changing times......or.........change with time

I was reading an article in business world about what ails Infosys this made me realize that how fragile is reputation , trust that an organization builds spanning over decades and in rare cases centuries

Infosys to an outsider like me appears to be an organization with strong culture….a culture that reflects its value system at the same time appears to be very staunch…overpowering….inflexible in its approach….its culture has not changed much with times…….there is enough data to show that the top most management believes in tight control over the organization at the same time they have a decentralized decision making system (conflicting is’nt it)…

Last quarter also infy failed to achieve forecasted growth; soon speculation began of what is wrong with Infosys. There are many thing which are wrong with infy at the moment however what needs to be reminded is that its an organization going through a huge transition….without the top management which have taken infy through her baby steps……it has come a long way…..for me I will put it like a child who is now entering turbulent teenage years…where there are conflicts…..internal changes……adaptation to eternal environment around us more so ever …formation of the adolescent years that lie ahead. Its not an organization which people can write of so easily……..people, investors, employees they need to have their faith intact and then only then can be part of the years that are ahead.

Its core competency lied purely in its GDM model which now has been adapted its peer organizations and competitors alike…..so what has Infosys left with now….what it needs to do is to innovate itself find its niche again….do what it did every time…bounce back with something new something unique….and true differentiator…But all this would require tremendous change….few ups and loads of down’s at the same time it needs to regain faith of investors and employee’s…but the question is how……..

It’s so easy for people like me to speculate…………..that this is wrong that is wrong and we Indians are PHD’s in it but we need to provide solutions as well…next time onwards…I’ll think (without googling)

Btw I had decide to write this blog with pure data and u know some typical MBA tuff but then as it goes I am still getting use to the typical MBA bhasha , however I had made some points while reading the article…..

· Conservative org culture , tight control and high focus on margins, forecasting shunning away business which were not profitable, conserving cash and growing organically

· US Europe market dependence diversification

· Improve profit, reduce cost , improvise product and services but how? Need for an innovative model but what

· Competitive advantage with GDM not anymore need to find another differentiating factor in GDM

· HUGE cash reserves of $4.1 billion …what are they doing with it (FDs also don’t yield you any return with this kind of money….invest it SOMEWHERE)