What is branding? Is it the use of distinctive design and advertising to promote a product and/or company? Sounds about right. Brands are brought to life through visual design, packaging and advertising across channels. What are the channels? Classically, they included mainstream mass media, points of sale, and the post purchase experience. The objective of a branding or advertising exercise was agreed to be either building awareness or driving memorability or trust or salience or preference or repeat purchase etc. All these initiatives constitute brand building. Has anything changed recently? Of course it has! This column wouldn’t exist otherwise.
Today, the last place a person looks at, to know about a brand and a product is its advertising or sponsored content. Blame it on the trust deficit generated through centuries of misguiding brand messaging. People are discovering the fine print and loopholes and all the clever lies that are camouflaged by great advertising. The emerging adults of today who will form the larger decision making population of tomorrow, are evaluating brands based on what goes on behind the scenes. A whole new set of factors are being considered before picking a brand from the sea of sameness.
Providing customer service at the price of employee welfare may serve business growth but it makes for chequered brand building. While packaging, promotions and compelling advertising has a significant role to play, branding duties no longer stop with this. It carries on – at all times – not just in what the customer sees and gets but also in what they hear and read about a company during their research.
Classically, the chief expectation from a brand was just to provide the highest standards in quality and bang for the buck. Today, the expectation from brands is to be good people.
I received a whatsapp forward from one of my aunts that began like this ”another 10 minute delivery, another life lost”. The forward ended with the question, “Do we really need grocery in 10 mins? Is it
really so hard to ait for 30 mins?” When the 10 min service was first introduced by Zepto, it sounded unbelievable and fun. Soon several players started to offer the same and we were spoiled silly. Until we learnt about the sad condition of delivery agents. It may not reflect immediately but realising the cost to on-ground employees, will make people open to other options from kind companies – as soon as it is available. This makes for fragile branding. A future strong brand will work out a balance between quick service and regular service – so as to strike a balance between customer service and service provider welfare.
Speaking of which, I came across an Instagram post in which one person pointed out the apathetic response by the management of a leading quick service app to the unreal expectations from delivery agents. What was interesting was among the mixed nature of the comments to this post were
several that said, “ Uninstalling the app”. And one telling comment that read, “never ork for a highly service-oriented company”.
Company heads glorifying the inhuman handling of their task force in the garb of hard hustle and dedication are being made a note of. Any company that emerges on the principles of balancing things out and care for their human resource will be building a durable brand. Namma Yatri is a case in point. People choose Namma Yatri despite the occasional, marginally higher cost because it is a cab service provider that empowers drivers while serving people. What people love is a win-win situation.
After all every person is an employee somewhere. A brand that is built on the culture of care and
respect for its employees – claimed and lived – makes for a stronger brand. Employer branding is no longer just for attracting the best talent. It is also for catering to the changing end consumer expectations from the brand. Employer branding is soon becoming an essential building block of brand building itself.
The views and opinions published here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher.
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