Building brands for the modern Indian consumer

We are in a phase of brand building evolution where the traditional rulebooks are being re-written. In the era of “skip button” culture, brand building has become more and more challenging. Consumers have acquired the power to opt out of linear advertisements. Consequently, brands are finding it more and more difficult to buy relevance. The only way out is to build relevance.

Just consider this. Content consumption has become ingrained in society across all demographics, and it’s fast evolving into content addiction. In this new world of endless scrolling, brands have to earn the right to stop the thumb from scrolling further if they want their content to be consumed and engaged with. In the new world, regardless of production costs, distribution costs or celebrity fees, content is evaluated and adopted or discarded with the upward sweep of a thumb in a matter of seconds. For a mass reach driven market like India, this observation alone has enormous implications in annual media budgeting and channel selection.

With the huge influx of VC money across all startups in India, more and more new products and services are being launched almost everyday. To stand out in this inevitable clutter, marketers need to give as much importance to long term brand building as to short term performance driven marketing. But the new age brand building playbook is fast being re-written.

Brand purpose — drilling down to the basics

Any new age brand needs to start not with the features of the product or service, but the REASON why that product/service should exist in the first place. And any self respecting brand that aims to survive and grow in today’s world must be built on a consumer insight — an actionable consumer truth.

Once the insight is clear, the brand needs to answer three questions:

1. Who is the target consumer? What’s needed is a pen portrait of the target consumer, someone whose problem the brand is aimed at solving, and someone who will say, “this brand understands me!”
2. What is the one specific problem of that target consumer the brand aims to solve?
3. How exactly is the brand going to solve this problem for its target consumer?

To build a brand that people truly fall in love with, we need to drill down deeper to identify more than just the obvious need the brand is answering. Simply ask why, why, why until we get to the bottom of why exactly does the target consumer want a solution to this particular problem. Once we hit that, it becomes easier to articulate what the true purpose of our brand is.

The consumer need identifies the problem; the brand purpose is the solution to that problem.

Once the brand clarifies its purpose — why it exists for the consumer, and takes all its decisions on the basis of that purpose, branding becomes consistent and tangible for the consumer.

Building emotional bridges

Brand loyalty is dead. Long live brand loyalty.

With the advent of discount led revenue models, infinite choices, and ready availability, many people have rung the death knell for brand loyalty. Is there even a need anymore to create brand loyalty amongst consumers?

The short answer is YES.

In fact, I would argue that what we have seen is the evolution of brand loyalty. Once, brand loyalty was forced by either availability (Ambassador cars were the only mainstream cars available at one point in India) or price (Bata shoes in the 90s).

However, this was false security, because better availability or price, or a combination of both, always dethroned these brands. Ambassador was killed by the arrival of Maruti Suzuki, and Bata was edged out by the likes of Myntra private labels.

So what drives brand loyalty today?

Indian consumers have moved to more sophisticated tastes and a better choice of brands. They only maintain transactional relationships with brands that focus on availability (distribution) and pricing (discounts). They give their loyalty to brands that align with their core beliefs and to which they can relate on a human level.

Let’s escort the elephant out of the room.

Getting the brand to align with the core beliefs of the consumers and relating to them on a human level creates an emotional connection that is far stronger than transactional relationships.

However, all this is useless unless the product performs the way it says on the label — in other words, the product needs to have a meaningful differentiation vs competition before a brand can be built. Case in point is Peppertap, the online grocery delivery app that shut shop in 2016, due to a combination of issues with the service they were offering — lack of inventory and high delivery costs. Another example is Theranos, the Silicon Valley tech company that claimed to have developed proprietary tests and devices that could conduct over 200 blood tests with just a small drop of blood — until it turned out they couldn’t.

Before we can start defining the brand and what it stands for, and how it emotionally resonates with the target audience, we need to start with the product itself. In order to build a brand that people love, the product needs to have meaningful differentiation.

This starts with identifying ALL the functional benefits that the product provides. Then we try and figure out how all of this builds to an overarching emotional territory — basically, how the brand will make its consumers feel.

The brand strategy is rooted in an emotional idea, but it’s an idea that’s supported by the product’s benefits. This emotional idea then acts as a moat, preventing other brands from copying the benefits at a cheaper price point.

Identifying with the consumer

Build your brand around your consumer

In the age old era of brand building (read: last decade) brands invited consumers to define themselves by choosing the brand. The brand you chose to buy said something about yourself, defined a part of your character for others to see. Someone who bought a Rotomac pen defined themselves as a hip, young, and yet practical person whereas someone who used a Parker differentiated themselves immediately as a discerning person with sufficient disposable income.

However, these codes have changed in the new world of brand building.

These days, brand building is less about establishing an identity and then waiting to attract consumers who self identify with your values, and more about creating a shared identity with your customers.

There is an emergent trend for new age brands to put their values, and not their logos, front and center. They attract consumers who identify with those values and not with the price tag.

Instead of asking the consumers to pay a pretty penny to signal something about themselves, these new age brands invite consumers who believe in and share the values of the brand to combine forces with the brand. They invite their consumers in with stories that intentionally stand counter to the traditional image conscious approach.

Creating connections

Businesses with a clear sense of purpose are able to build communities around themselves that other businesses simply can’t.

Why communities?

Brands that withstand the test of time do so by building connections. They build shared experiences for their consumers that create memories; ever expanding circles of connective tissue that bring together perfect strangers whose only point of contact is the brand.

The brand positions itself at the center of this circle, tapping into the consumers’ sense of identity and encouraging them to bond with each other over this shared piece of identity. People feel an affinity toward brands they love that extends beyond their relationship with the products. As a matter of fact, they even bond over the troubles they experienced while using the product. Those Indians who bought a Nokia as their first phone still reminisce over how it connected them to their loved ones, how sturdy it was, and how they survived with no Internet and only ‘Snake’ game as a form of entertainment.

The brands that have successfully built communities are the brands that people mutually obsess over, and this shared obsession creates a bond among strangers that is felt even if it can’t be seen. A sense of community further fuels people’s affinity for the brand, creating a virtuous cycle that strengthens loyalty among the group.

When brands invite people to become a part of the community, they circle the wagons and bring together the consumers in a cozy circle from which they are unlikely to leave, because doing so would mean they would lose a collective connection that has become a part of their identity.

The power of focus

Every brand that starts out today needs an initial tribe, a committed set of consumers who get behind the brand and become its loyal following. They know exactly what the brand stands for, even if they can’t articulate it well. And they identify with it. This is why most new consumer brands launch with a very limited offering — often just one or two products. On the surface, this may seem like giving consumers less control, but it’s actually about removing useless distinctions between myriad variants that waste people’s time and make their lives harder.

By curating the choices for them, these brands are actually doing their consumers a favour. We are unfortunately living in an era where we are inundated with an overload of choices, decisions to be made, information to be processed, and shows to be watched. So much so that Netflix had to resort to providing an option to randomly assign a show/movie for people to watch. This became necessary because the nearly infinite variety and options of shows mentally discouraged tired TV viewers into paralysis when it came to selecting new shows.

By focusing only on a few product choices, at least to start with, D2C brands can get right to the heart of the brand story instead of spending time helping people navigate through complex product variants. By offering less, these brands can stand for more.

Focus can help convey an attention to detail, a culture of quality over quantity. Brands that simplify the purchase cycle and do not force their consumers to agonize over multiple choices win in the long run.

Brands need to do the hard work of figuring out not just who they are, but also who they are not. This enables them to be very clear about what they stand for.

Redefining category expectations

Disrupt to serve the consumer

In the olden days of brand building, the unwritten rule was that new brands needed to closely study the category norms and follow them ALL, in order to ensure functional buy-in from consumers. Financial services needed to be staid and business-like, innerwear needed to be sexy, attractive and feature good-looking models, and calling a cab meant wandering out into the street in search of the nearest junction cab stand.

However, with the advent of technology and a generational change in the shopping mindset of consumers, radical behavioural shifts have been enforced by startup brands that disrupted existing consumer behaviour for the good. These startups succeeded by breaking conventional norms of the categories they operated in, not haphazardly, but purposefully. These disruptions were always in favour of the consumer.

This includes improvements like better customer service, easier navigation and shopping experience, and greater transparency.

All this helped build beloved brands in categories that were previously just transactional and not brand driven.

Ingrained consumer behaviour is hard to change — especially so when an entire generation has been brought up behaving in a certain manner. Without a well loved brand that connects people over a shared identity and makes the new behaviour desirable, it would be a lot harder to get an entire mass of people to shift their behaviour. But this is exactly what new age brands seek to do.

Make it personal

Gone are the days of big brands working in the market with the team behind it hiding in the shadows. Today, consumers want to know the people behind the company. A brand begins with the founders themselves.

Brands are humanized by consumers. They tend to form deeper, more human connections with brands. They are interested in how these brands fit into their identity, into their lives. They don’t like brands that seem like faceless, soulless entities. They want to bond with brands like they would with friends. One part of such bonding is an obsessive focus on customer service. Another is knowing the founding team behind the brand.

Whereas in the olden days founders were larger than life, unreachable role models (or villains), today their role has changed. Today founders are people like you or I, people whom we could know. A brand’s story becomes inextricable with that of the founding team. In fact, consumers love to know the story behind the curtain- this is what develops a feeling of kinship with the brand.

If a founder has direct experience working in the category they are disrupting, it lends both relatability and credibility. Founders who come to their business idea through personal experiences or revelations are inherently more passionate, and that passion is contagious — and consumers who connect with the reason behind why a founder started a brand (beyond the money aspect) are more likely to champion the brand and feel better about spending their money on the brand.

In conclusion

Wikipedia defines a brand as ‘a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers.’ While this definition may have held more or less true for several decades, the term ‘brand’ has evolved to mean so much more now.

Beyond tangible markers like name, design and symbol, brands today are evaluated on a mix of tangible and intangible yardsticks. Many of these may not even be in the direct control of the brand managers — ranging from ratings and reviews to delivery experience and content & responses on social media.

Today’s brands leave an indelible public resume in the form of their digital footprints. This means that oftentimes consumers have made a perception about the brand even before making their first purchase or seeing the first official ad of the brand. Hence brands are increasingly having to yield some control and allow consumers’ input in brand building.

Consumers today are engaged in a constant process of discovery and referral leading to judgements and even preconceived notions about brands. This means that marketing playbooks need to evolve to manage brand experiences across multiple touchpoints, beyond just those falling in direct purview of the brand.