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| “Brand builders will have to embrace evidence-based marketing and adopt brand building not as a creative process but as a strategic process.” |
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This change should unleash brand building as an independent and standalone business process, where brands could be developed as platforms even without a client or product in place. The development of viable brand solutions would provide a proof of concept for the notion of a “brand as a platform” and would spur further brand building activity and help holding entities migrate towards accepting branding as a DKP.
Second, brand builders will have to embrace evidence-based marketing and adopt brand building not as a creative process but as a strategic process. They would have to treat a brand as an engineered product whose feature set can be unbundled and developed in parts and the development process itself can be modularised. The benefit of this approach would be two-fold. On the one hand, it would help subject the elements of a brand’s feature set to evaluation metrics and assist in the re-engineering or refinement of the brand. On the other hand, it would facilitate the evaluation of the team members involved in the development of the individual modules that are integrated to create a brand as an engineered product.
Third, unlike what has been witnessed in many sectors where KPOs are flourishing, developers who participate in brand building as a DKP will have to resist the temptation of treating their service as merely distributed knowledge producing capacity. If they do, this DKP sector will become commoditised and largely provide only arbitrage benefits to its client sector. The service providers |
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should instead aim to deliver productised capacity wherein their knowledge capacity is converted into appropriate intellectual property that can be deployed to serve the holding companies that would be their clients. The productisation of knowledge capacity will help maintain separation among DKP service providers, prevent the migration of clients to lower cost centres over time, and increase their own valuation because of the presence of intellectual property component.
Finally, these firms will have to support the cultivation of a focussed talent pool that is indoctrinated with the brand-plus mindset, and trained for the creation of productised brand building capacity. This set will have to be complemented by an army of what could be thought of as ‘brand application engineers,’ who will customise these productised offerings to a global client base. As we have seen time and again, there is no shortage of raw intellectual power in the country. If it is organised and harnessed correctly, there is no reason why brand management can’t be created as a vibrant DKP right here. And, if done well, then the Indian service sector can migrate from being the World’s Back Office to the World’s Brand Office.
© Copyright, 2007. Piyush Kumar. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced either in part or full, or electronically stored into a retrieval system, or disseminated in any form (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the author’s prior written permission. |
