Leadership is branding Leadership and branding are hot topics in seminar circuit.

Many executive development programs are built around these subjects. Leadership means different things to different people. It means ability to inspire. Leadership is charisma, courage, and even sacrifice. Leadership requires vision. Leadership is talked about in rarefied atmosphere of CEO conferences, business schools, HR meets, and strategy meets. There seems to be an unstated and unanimous agreement that leadership is too important, too-sweeping-in-itsscope, too-good-to-be-described, and therefore too-complex-to-be-systematicallydeployed concept. Everyone is convinced that such indescribable leadership must be good for any organization. Branding too captures imagination of people. For some CEOs it is a reverential bowing item to be ticked off the agenda. For CFOs it is a black hole of cash. Sales people think it is a watering hole for unsuccessful ex-salesmen. For M & A specialists it is a valuation game. It is a playground of creativity for advertising agencies. It is PR first for PR agencies. For many, branding means eye catching, entertaining, beautiful visual and audio communications or smart copy. Everyone knows branding and everyone has definite opinions about it. Is there then any connection between leadership and branding? Leaders are responsible for branding. But they are also responsible for many other things. Are there any fundamental linkages? The answer for that might be found in people, since leadership and brands exist in minds of people. Brands provide neat and crisp symbols denoting product performance levels, shared experiences, dreams, aspiration and expectations of actual and potential users. Who will deny that leadership too deals with shared dreams, aspirations, and expectations of all stake holders -customers, employees, vendors and others? Like brands, leaders are seen as icons. There has to be a customer community based on shared expectations and understanding for a brand to come into existence. Amul is built literally on the basis of a community a community of 2.2 million milk producers! This makes Amul sensitive to communities. A whole generation of people have grown up reading and talking about those Utterly butterly delicious hoardings and their tongue-in-cheek messages in Mumbai. Amul is still a very strong brand. Leadership without a constituency is unthinkable. Leaders build constituencies through shared understanding of goals and ways to achieve them. How do communities come into existence? A unique feature, a benefit, some newness, or drama sets people talking. When people talk, when they integrate products in their lives, when they constantly share their experiences, problems, or solutions communities are formed. Communities can also be built around new categories of products. People love to talk. They need to share things. It is for a company to create or articulate such

uniqueness, to express it evocatively, and to nudge and support its customers into sharing it. Can this be done by marketing department alone? Can this happen by bombarding customers with advertisements, direct mail, or price promotions? Can this happen without a strong leadership? Customers get messages from others competing for their attention. They get familiar and bored with products or services. There is therefore a need to extend, broaden or deepen their beliefs about what is possible. Look at the FMCG sector (quoting from a study by AC-Nielson published by the Business Standard) -at roughly 30 years, skin cream is the youngest category in the top 10. The other categories are on the wrong side of 50, with categories like tea and soaps crossing the century mark. How can one get consumers genuinely interested? Easy way is throwing money at them discounting, freebees etc. More difficult but sustainable way is creating new products or categories for carefully chosen segments of customers and showing them what is possible. In this way brands can delight customers. Bringing irrepressible delight to customers is the soul of branding. Products or services have to be upgraded constantly. New products have to be launched. Supply and distribution chains have to be re-oriented. Customer communities have to be engaged by continuously raising bar. Entire organization has to be behind this. Brands are successful when customers lives or professions get positively charged by all that is done by them. A mere reputation of products should give way to activating customers imagination. Just as brands raise bar, leaders broaden horizons of their people. They inspire people to outdo themselves. Leadership means moving way from authority to respect, and from respect to inspiration. Strong and successful brands go beyond performance and excitement. They must stand for something which has lasting relevance. Products change, technologies change, but brands with strong attitudes, beliefs, and values remain relevant. Here again Amul comes to mind. Amuls hoardings became a talk of the town. They exuded the utterly butterly delicious attitude. Who can resist that humor and freshness? Who can resist innocence and poking fun at things around us? Doesnt building such brands require strong leaders with a sense of mission? It takes some thing more to bring brands to life. Brands need style. A distinctive appearance, user interface, or handling gives a very recognizable face and an aura to a brand. Without style brands would be dependable, high performance, but faceless products. Everything would be just right about them but they would be boring. They wouldnt invoke strong likes or dislikes. They wouldnt be real brands. Product or services design, the way customers are expected to choose, acquire, learn, and use them must be woven into the brand concept from the beginning. Style is must for creating cult brands. Style gets created through design of products. Toyota cars are just right when it comes to performance, safety, handling, or service. They look good. But they lack distinctiveness of the new Honda City, which has made its mark not just by a quirky, inyour-face kind of stance, a queer marriage of tall-boy design with aerodynamic body. Design was very important element behind building coffee bar brands like Barista or Caf Coffee Day. Many Indian brands do not achieve class because their leaders fail to

insist on excellence in product design. Many good products fail in the market place due to poor design. Style makes a statement, a brand needs it. Leaders have vision, mission, and agenda for their constituencies. They are being constantly observed, emulated, or criticized. They need to make statement all the time. Successful leaders know this intuitively and develop distinctive styles of their own. Without a backing of a community, without constantly shaping of expectations, and without class, products would just be fads or fashions. This is what most companies end up in doing under the name of branding. Style and hype are often taken as branding. Imagine a leader without a constituency, without inspiring vision, without a mission, and without enabling execution. Such a leader may have authority and style. The result would be just arbitrariness and pompousness. Leaders with just authority and style generate a lot of hype and sycophancy but nothing else. Branding requires taking a distinctive position and sticking to it. Intel, though it supplied more than 80% of the microprocessors to the world's computers, was hardly known outside a small band of industry insiders. Andy Grove led Intel into an aggressive branding campaign Intel inside that made the company a household name. Grove spotted the gap of perception in markets. Consumers gave no thought to what is inside PCs, leaving it all to the PC makers, mother board suppliers, and assemblers. For a technology company, this meant risk of commoditization, almost a death sentence. Such decisions require overarching vision which can come only from a strong, capable leader. Both involve choices. Deciding what should not be done is more important than what should be done. A brand can not satisfy all types of customers. To earn loyalty of some types of customers a brand must be willing to let other types customers go to other brands. Similarly a leader can not please everyone. Often a leader has to make painful trade-offs. Focus -staying true to the core of chosen position -is vital for leadership and brand building. Both require commitment to respective constituencies. Branding must lead to demonstrate-able improvement in the lives of customers and performance of companies. Top line growth, growth in margins, better forecasting, reduction in profit volatility must be the branding objectives and measures. Branding budgets will then qualify as investments in future, and not just an item in revenue expenses. Leadership, similarly, should aim for demonstrate-able improvement in the lives and performance of all stake-holders customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and society. In todays world leadership is branding. Successful branding and great leadership requires vision, values, performance, style and community building. Both require making difficult choices, sticking ones neck out, readiness to face guillotine when the time comes, and grace to accept success. Leadership and branding are possible only with passion, thinking, working, first walking alone, and then rallying others around. Hemant Karandikar

Through Exponient Consulting, Hemant Karandikar provides consultancy and coaching to CEOs in branding and leadership practices. An IITian, his rich portfolio of experience spans R & D, manufacturing and marketing. He led de-merger, and business startup activities leading to formation of Global Weighing India. Mr. Karandikar was formerly, Managing Director, Global Weighing India. He can be contacted by email at hemant.karandikar@exponient.com