A life full of logos!

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Brand Management course by Mr. Satheesh Krishnamurthy, Brand Consultant

It was 5 minutes to 6 in the morning, my Sony Ericsson disturbed my morning sleep with its alarm, hesitantly I woke up and as like any other diehard Chennai fellow, I started my day with a hot cup of Narasus filer kaapi and The Hindu, of course only after finishing my brushing routine with pepsodant....First ad in the paper that grabbed my attention was Globus sale!!!!! Got a plan for weekend …After devoting 20 minutes to The Hindu, I finished my bath with Hamam and grabbed a cup of kellog’s as breakfast since idli bored me a lot , oops…I realized I was running short of time ,,, In a hurry –burry ,,, I let myself inside my levi’s and polo …took possession of my fasttrack and ipod ( No wonder if I owe my entire life to steve jobs!!) ...dropped my acer and Philip Kotler’s Marketing management into my samsonite college bag … tied the lace of nike , kick started my pulsar and reached the college some how on time after negotiating serpentine twists and turns of Volvos and Leylands !

It was the first session on brand management by Prof. Satheesh Krishnamurthy. He started the session with a slide, showing how many brands we come across in a single day !!!! Immediately my mind recollected the brands that I come across since morning,, starting from Sony Ericsson to Pulsar , 16 on first count .. Mind boggling.. Just within 3 hours of the day I have used 16 different brands…my god!!! there is no second thought; definitely I do need sessions on brand management…

Then he continued the session with a question what is a brand and why we need to manage a brand!!!!...different replies came from every nook n corner of the classroom…. Professor absorbed all the answers and gave us the meaning for the term brand in marketing in a much more refined way and also the significance of brand management,, even from his words within first 30 minutes of session, we understood that, invariably behind every successful brand , there is a conscientious brand manager who considers his/her product as their own child and pamper it .. even protect it!!! from all other competing brands!!!!

The next important issue which we were introduced was the Do’s and Don’ts in product/ brand management…He strongly affirmed that a particular brand (established in a particular product category) should not enter market altogether in a different product category with the same name, due to the fact that consumer’s mind will refuse to associate the brand with new product category along with the examples of lot of brands which failed by adopting this wrong model.. We were truly able to appreciate his words when he quoted that Oral-B is from Gillette and argued that Oral-B would be not as successful as now if it would have been entered the market with the name carrying Gillette brush in it!!!! ….

During his course of discussing different issues surrounding brand management like,, what does a brand convey to consumers,, why brands and why brands are critical etc, he came up with loads of examples from both Indian and global markets. A four hour lively session came to an end with the topic “how hard is it to build a brand”…When ever a new brands enter into market, we tend to think it as just one more in the list…but within four hours we realized the intricacies behind that “one more” … Simply a great start for the ensuing brand management sessions … Thank you! Sir!

Contributed by Arun Saravanakumar, Marcom Varsity

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