Branding is identifying or creating, and then exploiting, sustainable competitive advantage.” - Ron Gossen & Alisha Gresham in Brand Papers

“The three key rules of marketing are brand recognition, brand recognition, brand recognition.” - unknown
Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.” - David Ogilvy
“Intel actually branded the inside of a computer. They took the most abstract thing you can imagine and figured out a way to make people identify with it.” - Justine Meaux, a research scientist for the BrightHouse Institute
It is said that managing a brand is like being the chauffeur of an expensive limousine. It’s expensive and you don’t own it, so you’d better be careful not to do anything that could damage it. You need to have a clear idea of where you want to take it, and how to get there. Don’t make any sudden turns, or your passengers might get sick or fall out; but don’t drive so slowly that they get bored and opt for faster transportation.

As Indian IT companies rapidly unfurl their flags across the six (or is it seven?) continents of the world, the biggest challenge they are facing is how to drive growth at a healthy pace while keeping the distance from the ever-expanding competition, without slipping off while building a sustainable business model. Their challenge is not very different from that of the automobile chauffer!

Is there a real need for Branding?
If you are an avid Kotler fan, here is a pop quiz for you. Which of the four statements you most agree with?

• a) Branding is a subset of business strategy
• b) Business strategy a subset of branding
• c) Business strategy cannot be separated from branding
• d) Business strategy is the same as branding

If you ticked a, b or d, you are wrong! The answer is c. Let me explain. For a services company, branding is more than the high performance expectation set by the marketers. It constitutes everything from the consumer’s experience to the business itself.
Again, emotional relevance by service and experience levels is difficult but not impossible to replicate. If you were a client, how would you differentiate between two IT Services companies with the same SEI CMM & PCMM certifications with similarly qualified engineers providing IT Helpdesk support, who delivered the same kind of work?

The answer lies in business strategy execution. The sum of how a company manages its external environment, its processes, its HR, its marketing - all taken together - ultimately decides the performance expected from your brand, especially in the post-Internet world.
So we have a contradiction - branding is an element of business strategy and in turn business strategy is an element of branding! To simplify things and find an answer to the pop quiz, let’s simply say, “Branding is inseparable from business strategy and is essential for survival!”

Perfect competition requires heavy-duty branding
The Indian IT services firms find themselves in a market with lots of players offering services that are substitutes - and at a high quality but low price. This is quite like a state of competitive equilibrium that economists call ‘perfect competition’. In this market:

• There are a few barriers to entry - more than 50+ SEI CMM Level 5 Indian IT Services companies feeding from a skilled, mathematically inclined and English-speaking labour pool.
• Prices determined by supply and demand - sky-high rates in the supposedly mission-critical Y2K spending binge days, have fallen over the last few years.
• ‘Complete information’ is available - thanks to the industry bodies, analyst firms, and the Internet.

You need branding to counter misconceptions
The Indian IT Services firms are perceived in a particular way in the marketplace, not all of which is complementary and not all of which is undeserved. The players are perceived as ‘mass market techies arbitraging labour rates’ rather than ‘smart business problem solvers who use technology smartly’.

What defines an Information Technology brand?
Branding your IT company would include a way of interacting with whoever touches whatever part of your business: from your letterhead and logo to how employees answer the phone to what goes in your campus ‘pre-placement talk’, to ‘when you got the SEI CMM Level 5’, to your onsite techie’s table manners. Branding is the integration of everything about your company to create consistency for all your stakeholders - customers and prospects, vendors, employees and potential hires, suppliers, competitors, analysts and government bodies.

The Current state of Indian IT Brands
If you take out the ‘low price @ good quality’ tag, what else do we honestly offer?
The first flush of growth in the IT Services industry happened due to the body-shopping boom. Y2K, Internet revolution, and BPO followed one after the other keeping cumulative growth rates at a heady 50 per cent year after year. This meant that the players needed to be good only in sales and delivery and had little need for marketing or brand building.

There have been various reasons why the most successful Indian IT companies - the IT Services - had no need to brand themselves:

• Because Global Delivery brought in huge savings, the focus was on pricing led differentiation. This meant that being located offshore was enough to sustain the players.
• Return on innovation investments require long gestation periods. Most Indian firms were looking at quick returns - within a quarter, half a year, a year.
• The firms had their hearts and souls set to on sales and delivery; marketing happened to be incidental.
• The marketing function - if it existed - reported to Sales. And sales will not focus on esoteric concepts like ‘brand-building’ when the going is good and the dollars are brought in by the shovelful.

Now that has changed. This is because the global model of services delivery has gained momentum across customers, and if you have enough customers, you will have enough vendors with every developing country keen to replicate the India model.

Horizontal Competence without focus leads to commoditisation
To take the maximum of the upside, the IT Services players targeted all industries and all basic building-block IT services without the scale of an IBM or an EDS to deep dive into an industry. They neither had industry-specific solutions nor deep stacks of technology services. As more players entered, their offerings became commoditised.
Al Ries believes that Indian IT Services companies lack focus. The key-branding concept, he says, is to be a specialist, as power lies in dominance: 50 per cent of one market was better than 10 per cent in all markets.

Fallout of de-risking - not innovating!
There is nothing wrong with de-risking per se. Having predictable revenue streams and not missing revenue forecasts quarter after quarter are the stuff out of which legendary companies are made. But if de-risking is not limited to corporate finance but extends through the corporate boardroom into every sphere of operations - into the lifeblood of the company, we have a problem.
Companies which focus on de-risking as the be-all and end-all of corporate strategy tend to look at the future as a straight line extending from the past, hoping that yesterday’s tried and tested solutions would somehow solve tomorrow’s business problems. The proportion of R&D budget-to-revenue for them is much lower than their international peers. And - you guessed it right - more than 98 per cent of the Indian IT companies fall in this category.

How to build the Indian IT Brands?
Rule #1: Know where branding will not work

• Focusing on brand could lead to the kiss of death for a start-up firm trying to create repeat business in a crowded marketplace. Example: The dot-com meltdown showed that heavy investment in branding rung the death-knell of so many ‘branding is everything’ companies.
• Customers are buying what a technology service/product will do, not the marketing. For small players, getting referrals from your customers could be far more important than spending scare resources on brand building.
• Why do you want to do branding? Is it because everybody is doing it - or because you want to differentiate yourself from the competition? The sharper the differentiations, the better off you are.
  Once you’ve made sure that branding will work for you, go ahead, and read the rest of the rules.

Rule #2: Know where branding is essential
Remember the ‘perfectly competitive’ markets we discussed earlier?
Players in this market need to stand out. You need some strong differentiator and talk about that.

Prime candidates for IT ‘brands’ that require strong branding:

• Your services are very similar in features, benefits and price to the competition’s
• The way your various departments describe your company sounds like the apocryphal six blind men describing an elephant.

Possible way to create differentiation:

• Doing something in technology that is too narrow that others cannot do E.g. let’s say IP work in mobile technology for CRM.
• Limiting to one or two verticals E.g. Kale Consultants, in spite of being one of the earliest players in the financial services industry, decided to focus only on the Travel and Transportation industries, where they were stronger.

And to add to that differentiation, don’t forget to talk about it
Rule #3: It’s a people’s business - period!
Get the best, retain them, and get them to live the brand!
Imagine you are the CEO of a mid-sized Indian IT firm. What would make the best and brightest of the worlds, with multiple job offers, want to join you? No, it’s not your global MNC tag; it’s definitely not your salary package; not even the foreign postings you promise them. It’s the projects you give them, the opportunities to learn and apply, stretch-challenges you set for them, and how they can boast about the challenges they faced and overcome, the adrenalin rush they got on the job.

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