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| The author, Piyush Kumar, Associate Professor of Marketing at the Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, and a consultant in the areas of brand strategy and service management, explains how brand management could be developed into a Distributed Knowledge Process in India, transforming the Indian service sector from the ‘World’s Back Office’ to the ‘World’s Brand Office.’ |
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According to a recent news story, Lenovo is setting up a global marketing hub in Bangalore for its brands. The hub will formulate and track its brand strategies and help optimise the use of the firm’s brand assets deployed across the globe. While the news may not be completely unexpected, what is certainly surprising is the amount of time it has taken for brand management to be widely recognised as a business process that can be de-linked from a corporation’s headquarters and even outsourced.
Over the last decade or so, we have seen the emergence of what could be called a brand-and-source global economy (BSGE). In this new and still emerging environment, a separation is taking place between brand owners and what we could call product fulfillers. Today, the owners or holders of brands are increasingly less likely to be the producers of the products or services that are marketed under it. For example, a brand owner in the US may design its products in Europe, manufacture them in Asia, and distribute them globally.
This trend has resulted in a structural shift in what a corporate entity is, and what it does and does not do. Many entities have undergone organisational peeling or an unbundling of the tasks that they perform as an organisation, and the associated competencies that they need to develop internally. In a BSGE environment, many |
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tasks that were traditionally performed within are increasingly being distributed and spun off to where they can be performed best and often at lower cost. And, because some of these processes have been distributed to entities across national boundaries, terms like outsourcing and off-shoring have become a part of everyday management vocabulary.
However, it is perhaps ironic that globalisation and outsourcing are often talked about in the same breath. Globalisation represents the move towards a unified singular market for both production and consumption and the notional dissolution of national boundaries. The concept of off-shoring, on the other hand, is tied to the acknowledgement of the importance of national boundaries and a clear separation between what is inside those boundaries and what is outside. And when the intellectual component of what is developed outside is high, it gets labelled as an outsourced knowledge process. However, if consumption and production markets are becoming truly global, then it is perhaps inappropriate to strategise in terms of outsourcing versus in-sourcing.
Instead, an organisation should be thought of as a combination of a holding entity and distributed processes. And, with the emergence of cost-optimised centres of excellence for a variety of processes, including design, manufacturing, customer |
