Brand Management

Brand management aims to create brand by intentional action. Deliberate decisions are made about brand personality, brand values, brand positioning, brand logos, etc. Attention is paid to customers and competitors. Done smartly, the whole strategy and culture of the company are lined up behind the brand to deliver

So what is branding?
Commonly used together with marketing, branding is actually a distinct concept, which if used effectively eliminates the need for costly marketing and promotional drives.

While marketing and promotions involve sending quickfire, active messages targeted at selling the product, branding is a slow process. Branding is a slow process, designed to entrench you strongly in your customers mindspace. Unlike selling and marketing, it is not about closing a deal and earning a quick buck through commissions. It is about building your image over a period of time.

In property brokerage business, branding is the equivalent of your promise to your customers It is about building an image in the minds of prospective homebuyers and tenants and creating the perception that you are the best..

As a real estate agent, your goal should not be to place as many classified advertisements or call as many people as possible. Your goal should be to create an image that people remember. As an agent you are selling yourself. So what about you do you want people to remember you for?
One way to approach the issue of branding is to ask: What makes me different from all the other real estate agents in the market? It may be your personality, your commitment, your passions, your sense of purpose,all those traits that make you unique and different.

If you wish to brand yourself successfully, you must first analyze where you are and where you want to go. You must evaluate yourself and your business: What do you want to achieve? Which markets do you want to capture? Do you want to focus on serving the needs of tenants, of property buyers or investors? Do you want to focus on the residential market, the office market or the retail market? Do you want to serve the super-rich, the rich, the middle-class, etc?
Do you have a target segment at all or do you serve whoever comes to you? Do people or organizations consider you a specialist in providing real estate solutions to a well-defined segment, say to top management professionals of multinational companies in Gurgaon and Noida? Over a period of time, try to make your name synonymous with your brand to the extent that your target, for instance, junior executives of MNCs looking for shared apartments, think of you first when they want to shift to a new location. You should come to their mind regardless of whether you give five classified advertisements in the same newspaper on the same day, or advertise yourself only once a week or a fortnight.

Dettols cuts and bruises A few case facts on Branding

In its 65-year-old history, Dettol, the brand now owned by Reckitt-Benckiser, has seen some seven or eight product extensions from mouthwash to prickly heat powder. One more a floor cleaner called Dettol Gold is being test marketed in Kolkata and Chennai. An anti-dandruff shampoo is was also reportedly on the launch-pad

 1991 till today, This was also the period when most of the product extensions took place. But if you thought this impressive growth was the result of all those hectic product extensions, think again. Almost three-fourths of todays turnover comes from Dettol soap, which was introduced in the eighties. The core antiseptic liquid accounts for less than a quarter of Dettols sales. The rest shaving cream, medicated plaster, mouthwash, prickly heat powder, antiseptic cream and so on make up a minuscule percentage. Clearly, with the notable exception of soaps, Dettols efforts to stretch its brand equity to other contiguous products have been a failure. Though the specific reasons for failure varied in each case, the overall result highlights a unique problem for marketers the limits of transferring the core values of a powerful brand to other product categories.

 To be sure, the decision to opt for product extensions can hardly be faulted. Launched in 1936, Dettol antiseptic liquid was as generic to its category as Xerox became to copiers. There was little that needed to be done to promote it Dettols brand equity was built through sheer usage over the years. So to stoke sales, Reckitt (then Reckitt Colman of India) decided to expand Dettols usage beyond cuts and bruises. This resulted in a communication campaign that showed that Dettol could be used as an all-purpose antiseptic while shaving, rinsing babies nappies, as a general disinfectant and so on. Soon, all these uses pointed to a number of possible extensions, a fact that subsequent consumer research validated.

 Dettol soap was first off the racks. Strangely, though it may be a winner today, it was not an outright success initially. This was because Reckitt & Colman launched Dettol soap on a premium platform which was way off the brands core properties of hygiene and cleanliness.

When the product bombed, Reckitt quickly relaunched it the following year as a 100 per cent germ fighter a positioning that has worked so well that Dettol soap commands a share of 11 per cent of the premium soap market today. In the mid-1990s, increasing competition within the soap category sent the company looking for a fresh initiative. The major competition now came from Hindustan Levers Lifebuoy, which the company was trying to upgrade by introducing it in liquid form in a plastic dispenser.

 Dettol liquid soap worked because its contemporary and convenient format actually strengthened the brands core values and bought the brand out of the the first-aid boxes into the household. The frequency of usage, too, has substantially jumped over the years. Encouraged by the successful extension into liquid soap, Dettol added two variants over the last one year Dettol Extra with moisturiser and a glycerine variant, Dettol Junior (which was launched last month). It is too early to judge the performance of Junior, but company sources say Extra has not been able to induce trials. No one has ascribed a reason to this, but given the soaps history, it can be assumed that the moisturiser put Dettol in the beauty soap sphere, where it didnt quite fit. Retailers say Extra is being clubbed with other Reckitt products as a freebie to induce trials. While this is normal practice with most FMCG marketers, it is also true that Dettol is having to do this more often. Extras fate has, in fact, cast doubts on the fate of Junior.

 In the case of soap, where the extension worked well, the product maintained the core value of protection against germs without cosmetic appeal. But beyond this core area, Dettol is on weak ground. That is why when Reckitt tried to add cosmetic appeal for its soap by adding moisturiserin Dettol Extra, the gameplan didnt work.

The fate of medicated plasters and shaving creams has, however, been a bit ignominous. In terms of usage, the forays into both markets in the early nineties also made sense. The problem, though, was that the market for both was not large enought to justify the relatively heavy investments that product extensions required.

 The launch of medicated plasters, in fact, was more a combative strategy against Johnson & Johnson (J&J) rather than an extension that flowed from market needs. This was around the time J&J had bought the rights to market to Savlon, Dettols only rival in domestic antiseptic liquids. With its traditional turf under threat, Dettol decided to return the compliment by attacking J&Js hegemony in medicated plasters. Dettol medicated plaster was introduced to coincide with the relaunch of Savlon.

The extension made sense because Dettol had established credentials as a germ protector for cuts and bruises. The problem was that, at just Rs 20 crore, the market was too small. Not only that, this market had a feisty number two in Bieirsdorfs Handy Plast, which was already giving J&J a run for its money in several markets.

 Similarly, the shaving creams market was small (about Rs 50 crore at the time), but Dettol had strong compulsions to get into that category. A study commissioned by Reckitt in 1996 revealed that about 40 per cent of regular shavers used some kind of antiseptic lotion after shaving, and 30 per cent used Dettol liquid. The same study also showed that those who used Dettol didnt feel the need to use any after shave lotion. Moreover, the average frequency of purchase of Dettol liquid was once every ten months. That sent Reckitt looking for a product extension that could satisfy the same need and be picked up more often. Ergo why not try shaving creams and gels? This was logical, but Dettol made a mistake of venturing into a market in which it didnt have any expertise. Shaving creams and gels are part-utility and part-cosmetic products, and Dettols two-in-one proposition didnt address the latter need at all (after all, no one would have wanted to smell of Dettol after a shave). It was the same mistake that Dettol later made with Dettol Extra.

 But the earlier lessons had clearly not been assimilated. In 2000, Reckitt made the same mistake when it entered the talc market with Dettol prickly heat talc. The size of the talcum powder market is roughly Rs 750 crore, but the prickly heat segment accounts for less than 15 per cent of that. Two months ago, Dettol talc was phased out. To be fair, Dettols failures at brand extension are no exception. The difference, however, is the consistency with which its extensions have bombed.

There are two aspects to brand extension. One is the brand name, the core properties and its end use. The second is the relevance of the category to which the brand is being extended. Dettol suffered on both counts.
When brands with a narrow set of values transcend into a functional extension then there could be a problem, says Srilekha Agarwal, director, Quantum Market Research.

 The logic of these extensions are hard to see. Would a housewife, who is being urged to use Dettol Junior as a protective soap for her child or use Dettol shampoo on her hair, agree to use the same brand to clean her floors?
Kapoor of Samsika suggests that these extensions will eventually impinge on the mother brand: It is like oversqueezing the sugarcane many times over to extract the juice which may no longer be sweet. Hence caution must be exercised. Certainly, the company has assimilated some of the mistakes of the past. It has now put aside a quarter of its media spend for antiseptic liquid. But how far this will help its variants is the real challenge.

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