Branding challenges for start up companies - Discussion at Chennai

Salin Amanda Louis speaks - Prime Point Srinivasan looks on

Green India, a Chennai based NGO founded by Prasanna Venkatesan (Chartered Accountant) and V Ravi organised a Seminar at Chennai on the theme of  'Make in India - Start up Companies' on 26th March 2016.  Many experts from Technology, Finance, Investment, Audit, Tax Laws shared their views.

Prime Point Srinivasan  spoke on 'Branding Challenges for Start up companies'. During his talk, he was critical about the existing and new companies who never gave importance to the branding and communication strategies.  He expressed that the amount of importance given to technology, law, finance, etc was not given to communication.  "The companies should package their performance, so that their marketability goes up.  The mantra should be 90% performance and 10% packaging through communication techniques, i.e. branding", he said.

Prime Point Srinivasan also said that many of the Indian companies were suffering from 'I know it all syndrome'.  The CEOs never approached the right professionals for communication and hence, they were unable to plan proper strategies.  

Prime Point Srinivasan was assisted by Salin Amanda Louis, Co-Founder of Persona, a branding and leadership strategy firm.  

"What one needs to understand is that Branding is strategic and marketing is tactical.  Many Indian companies focus a lot on the product but fail to brand and communicate the product with the right message to the right audience using the right tools at the right time." Salin Amanda said.  She elaborated the importance of right message, right audience, right tool and right time with her own experience.  She quoted the example of a company, who did not care for the advice of the consultant, later lost heavy market to their competitor who implemented the right strategy in right time.  She was repeatedly insisting on the 'right time' to implement communication strategies.  

She also added that Branding was often mistaken for advertising which was not the case. Branding was the theme/concept while advertising was just a tool to convey the concept. 

She concluded by saying that in the current changing environment, only 'specialists' could make an impact than the 'Generalists'.  

Picture courtesy : Sridhar