Ashutosh Garg - The Brand Called You

The Brand Called YOU

The Brand Called
YOU

Ashutosh Garg

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First published in India 2019

This edition published 2019

Copyright Ashutosh Garg, 2019

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ISBN: 978-9-3880-3860-7

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To

my wife Vera

and

my sons,

Varun and Ashwin

Contents

A brand is a story that is always being told.

As an individual, you are constantly reinventing yourself through each stage of your life. A brand is perceived by its target audience, based on personal experience, communication, and impression. This determines its success or failure. The same applies to each one of us. How we are perceived in society and with our target audience determines how valuable we are or can be.

I do agree that personal branding sounds very narcissistic. But that is the essential reality. Our name and the entire persona comprise our personal brand.

I remember an enlightening instance of personal branding. It was in 1979, the year I finished my business school from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai. I was a member of the placement committee of the institute and as was done for all previous batches, I was tasked with putting together a placement brochure containing details of all my batchmates. This placement brochure was to be sent to potential employers before they came to the campus for interviews.

As I was going through the resumes of my batchmates, I was fascinated to see one person had, in the column showing languages spoken, mentioned English, Tamil, Hindi, COBOL, and FORTRAN! The last two were computer languages, and he wanted the world to know, through the placement brochure, that he had the ability to speak and interact with the recently introduced computers in the world of business. Every interviewer asked him the reason of listing these languages in his resume and he was selected for every job that he applied to. I marvelled at this individuals foresight and his ability to steer an interview discussion to an area, which was his strong point.

So much for personal branding.

My batchmate had understood the very simple yet complex communication that needs to be understood and mastered in a placement exercise for building Brand You.

As Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has said, Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room. It is like the wake of a boat as it moves forward rapidly. Your brand differentiates you from others. It helps you build your authority in your area of expertise that gets people to hear what you have to say.

Your personal brand is your professional DNA. It is your professional gene sequence.

Having worked for some of the biggest brands in the country and then having built Guardian Pharmacy as a major health and wellness brand across India I have often been asked what a brand is, and I have generally responded with the standard well-accepted definition of a brand.

The dictionary has several definitions of the word brand but two important ones that I like are:

• A type of product manufactured by a particular company under a particular name and
• An identifying mark burnt on livestock or (especially in former times) criminals or slaves with a branding iron.

Both these definitions convey very different meanings and yet what a brand does is to serve as an identifier for the person who owns the product, service, or offering.

David Ogilvy, the guru of branding and advertising, described a brand as the intangible sum of a products attributes.

One day, someone asked me, Which is the biggest brand in your country?

I thought for a while and then rattled off some of the well-known names such as Apple, Microsoft, Tata, Reliance, Coke, ITC, Infosys, IBM, etc.

He shook his head and said, The rupee is the biggest brand in India.

The Indian currency is the biggest brand in India!

Everyone uses the rupee as a currency and as a medium for transactions all the time and yet no one ever thinks about the rupee as a brand. The same logic applies to currencies in every country. The US Dollar, the Chinese Yuan, the Euro, the British Pound, and others are all huge brands and yet are always taken for granted by us. At the same time, after the Euro was introduced on 1 January 1999, all other currencies of European countriesthe German Mark, the French and Swiss Francs, the Greek Drachma, the Italian Lira and othersdisappeared, leaving behind a huge vacuum in the minds of the citizens.

Therefore, if one is to extend the same logic further, which should be the biggest brand for you as an individual?

After a lot of thought and over the years, I realized that my own name was the biggest brand for myself. In other words, your name is your biggest brand. Not just for you alone but for your family, the past, present, and future. How often have we heard of the value of the family name for generations to come? Yet, why is it that most of us never realize the value of our names? I am reminded of a story just before I went out for my first date to a school party that was arranged with the neighbouring girls school, when I was sixteen years old (yes, in the early seventies, this was the age when young boys and girls were first permitted to meet socially at school socials!). My father called me and said, Son, go out and have fun at the party but just make sure you do not do anything that would hurt the name of our family.

How often do we look at a person before we are introduced to him or her and form our own assessment? Or the way they look, how they dress, how they hold themselves, how firm their handshake is, how they speak, etc. We are always quick to make judgements based on the physical attributes of the person and depending on this assessment we determine how we will deal with the person until we get to know and understand the person, if at all.

Billions of dollars are spent each year by thousands of companies in multiple mediums to promote their brands with the primary objective of getting a higher recall from the proposed or potential customer. Some forms of advertising work and some do not. Companies do not know which part of the advertising is working and, therefore, keep investing more and more money.