Tag: Brand consultancy

  • Interbrand strengthens India leadership; announces new appointments and elevations

    Interbrand strengthens India leadership; announces new appointments and elevations

    Mumbai: Brand consultancy – Interbrand has bolstered its leadership team by appointing four executives in elevated and new roles, with the goal in mind to drive strategic partnerships, accelerate growth, and burgeon overall enterprise value.

    Satish Krishnamurthy assumes the role of chief strategy officer. Ameya Kapnadak takes on the role of chief growth officer and head of consulting – Interbrand India. Payal Shah has been named the strategy director and head – human truths, India. Rahul Bansal will function as the strategy director and head of brand economics, India.

    Speaking about the new leadership team, Interbrand India, India & South Asia CEO Ashish Mishra said, “We had a late entry into the Indian market but were able to achieve local leadership for the world’s leading brand consultancy in a very short span. We have the top five branding projects of the decade as our showreel. Winning and delivering these iconic brand transformations, including Godrej, Jio, Britannia, Infosys, Mahindra, Hero MotoCorp, and Nerolac, took brilliant and committed talent.”

    “Most of whom have been the core of our team for most of our history. Our people have grown with the firm and are poised well to create the next generation of icons. At Interbrand, our priority is to nurture a global community of thinkers and makers with the curiosity and confidence to create iconic work,” he added.

    Satish Krishnamurthy brings 21 years of global strategic experience to Interbrand, having worked across brand consulting, creative strategy, and design thinking. His diverse experience straddles from driving strategic mandates for large agencies in the US and India, to being a behavioural architect, and also being a Ted X speaker. Satish has crafted unique ways to solve problems by taking inspiration from various disciplines. He has impacted successful outcomes for large clients across positioning, service and experience design, and opportunity consulting.

    Ameya Kapnadak leads the growth and consulting teams at Interbrand’s India office. Over the last 25 years, he has worked on and built some of India’s most iconic brands. Ameya has a wide and deep experience across diverse industries, including technology, banking and finance, automotives, consumer goods, food, and fashion and retail. He started his branding career at J Walter Thompson, and has since worked at Mudra, ICICI Bank, and The Times Group, before joining Interbrand in 2011. Ameya is a pharmacist by qualification and holds a master’s degree in management from the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies.

    As a strategy director at Interbrand, Payal Shah’s approach is to help brands rise to meaningful arenas for growth and sustainable iconic leadership. Possessing a multi-faceted personality and more than 15 years of experience in USA and India, she has been working across categories such as spirits, FMCG, technology and fashion. Some of her clients in the past were Pernod Ricard, Britannia and Gucci. Payal believes in the power of storytelling and delves into experiences for brands that inhabit them. She believes in purposeful innovation that harnesses behavioural data in order to amplify brand growth and value creation. Beyond creating brands, she’s a brand mentor at Ecole Intuit-Lab and the host of ‘Design Rendezvous’.

    Rahul Bansal joined Interbrand India in 2016 in their strategy vertical. In this role, he has helped with the expansion of Interbrand’s footprint in South Asia across Sri Lanka, UAE, and Bangladesh while also leading projects for some of the largest public and private sector brands in India. Prior to Interbrand, Rahul has worked across a diverse range of functions and sectors, including business consulting to help bring global consumer brands into India, gaming, and e-commerce in Southeast Asia.

  • Interbrand elevates Gonzalo Brujó to global chief executive role; appoints Ashish Mishra as CEO- India & South Asia

    Interbrand elevates Gonzalo Brujó to global chief executive role; appoints Ashish Mishra as CEO- India & South Asia

    MUMBAI: Brand consultancy, Interbrand, announced a series of senior staff promotions, aimed to create a revised leadership structure globally and for the South Asia region. Gonzalo Brujó is now the global chief executive officer (CEO). Brujó succeeds Charles Trevail, who will take on the role of executive chairman. Another key people development also took place with the elevation of Ashish Mishra as the CEO of India & South Asia.

    Brujó has been global president since February 2021, leading day-to-day operations of Interbrand whilst maintaining leadership of the company’s growth agenda, which builds off his highly successful tenure as global chief growth officer. He spent more than 15 years scaling the Interbrand business in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East.

    “It’s a great honour to step into this senior leadership role at Interbrand at such a pivotal moment,” said Brujó. “The role that brands play in our lives is fundamentally changing – as is the world we live in. Branding is no longer a moment in time, and the brands that stand still will quickly lose relevance. I am excited to partner with our world-class clients and employees to achieve game-changing results in this rapidly shifting landscape.”

    Ashish Mishra also spoke about what contributed to its consistently high performance in the local and adjacent markets. “We are the world’s premier brand consultancy and I’m privileged and honoured to be leading growth in these key markets to greater heights. But what’s more satisfying is the fact that we have been able to drive some much-needed shifts in the Indian business mindset. Elevating branding to a respectful, strategic status; getting a seat for branding at the management and board levels; encouraging the advertising and packaging design-bred marketing fraternity to begin to see brands as a strategic tool to drive business value. It also establishes the consciousness around the idea of brand value and valuation through our IPs – Best Global Brands and Best Indian Brands.”

    These elevations highlight Interbrand’s push to make what it calls “Iconic Moves”, which are bold steps taken to help brands leap ahead of customer expectations and drive competitive advantage. Iconic Moves are a part of pivotal shifts in the world of brands and branding being driven by Interbrand worldwide, according to the company.

    Currently, Interbrand India, a full-service consultancy started in 2013, will step up the branding practice across the region by letting their brands drive broader business arena opportunities, and developing more efficient business models, according to the company.

  • Think beyond the usual discounts, advices Raghu Vishwanath

    Think beyond the usual discounts, advices Raghu Vishwanath

    MUMBAI: The festive season is here and the brands have gotten busy with new and innovative communications to make the most in today’s volatile market.

    After a slowdown of the economy for a couple of years now, at least in terms of consumer sentiment, economy seems to be looking up, mainly due to an expected stable government at the centre. Hence, the coming festive season is significantly better than the ones of the last couple of years.

    The media agencies have also revised ad spends for the year looking at the trends especially post general elections.

    However, even after spending lakhs or sometimes even crores, a brand is not able to create the correct connect with its TG.

    “The marketers should think of more innovative promotions this time round. The usual discounts and freebies are no longer attractive to today’s consumers,” says Vertrebrand managing director Raghu Vishwanath while adding that promotions should aim at creating memorable experiences for the whole family.

    The end-to-end brand management consultancy, which focuses on improving the customer connect of any business through a rigorously scientific, structured process, says that a brand is a bundle of functional benefits and added values that the selected core target customers/consumers value enough to buy into repeatedly. Therefore, a brand, which dynamically keeps connected to its target group of customers to deliver both functional and added values, that they value, will stay ahead in the category even in today’s volatile market.

    After having created early success stories with leading brands like Apollo Hospital, Vodafone, Dainik Bhaskar, Shriram Properties, Mom & Me and many more, Vertebrand has, over the years, worked with a number of national and international clientele spread across industry sectors.

    Today’s consumer is very well networked and informed. The very definition of ‘Brand’ is that it is for a selected consumer, so how can one survive by ignoring them? “We have to move from firm-centric paradigm of value and its creation to engaging with our targeted customers. We have to shift from traditional goods-services mind-set to an experience mind-set. For example, most self service outlets offer similar branded products in tea/toothpaste/soaps etc. but consumer choose one over the other,” highlights Vishwanath.

     India is a land of entrepreneurs.  We have businesses which feature in the list of Fortune 500, but not Indian brands. The reason behind this is that most Indian businesses think brand is a luxury for large businesses and mostly about pretty pictures. “Whereas VB believes brand is equal to business and business equal to brand,” he adds.  

    The consultancy has various tools  like V-Trak, V-Cap, V-Shape, which help brands across sectors create a strategy which will help them know what will work for them or not.
    It mostly works on Brand Quotient (BQ), which helps to measure the effectiveness of the brand. The branded offer is measured against four major aspects of the brand, namely: Brand Strategy – strength of differentiation, Brand Alignment – internal alignment of the organisation to brand essence, Brand Communication – clear position communication and Brand Execution – consistently driving the brand experience in the real world.

    The BQ number shows the strength and areas of improvement for the brand.

    However, lately, many brands have been caught in controversies as well. The favourite being the fairness creams. Is any publicity good? Answers Vishwanath, “Controversy always will bring attention. If it is unwanted, the brand will get negatively impacted. Laws can be made tighter but the moral code of conduct should be applied by all marketers and brand owners to keep the commercial landscape clean and positively charged.”

    “Lately, there is more consciousness building to invest in branding, yet far from ideal,” he concludes.