The Jesus Brand

THE WORLD is of branding. No, it’s not marketing. Marketing has lost that ‘X-factor’. It’s branding now. Just have a fair glance at our local deities - Aamir Khan is brand perfectionist, Lalu is brand rural India, Shahrukh is brand metrosexual and the Stick Bebo is brand size zero. Everybody is feeding on their own brand, even living on it. Branding is the talk of the town. This trend has only created the demand of the mushrooming advertising agencies and brand promotion organisations.English artisan Josian Wedgwood was the first to build the modern business brand. Wedgwood was able to develop demand for his tablewares and command premium price over comparable tableware and other products. Those were the days of the 18th century when the term branding was not known. By the 1920s branding emerged as a discipline and a key tool of marketing in the world. Pioneers in the development of this discipline were Procter and Gamble and Lever Brothers.India remained out of this branding trend ever since. The first instance, which can be remembered as a brand establishment was the promotion of Lux as a beauty soap and the soap of film stars. That was the time when, Lux brought Indian actresses in bath tubs to your living rooms. The wave started from Leela Chitnis to Priyanka Chopra.There were times when Petroleum Jelly was Vaseline, Soap was Lux and Toothpaste was Colgate. Nobody then could think of a different thing in the world, when every villager called the land outside their reign as des. Those were the days when India was called the ‘Golden Bird’.When the wave of branding began, it swept away the whole of subcontinent.

This gave birth to such a scenario, which continues till today. Today a product is a brand. It has a personality like you and me. A company likes to associate itself with a popular face be it a film actor, TV actor or a sport-star. Although there are exceptions to this, initially Hutch and now Vodafone played on a new tactic. They used a pug formerly and are now playing on with alienated adorable characters called zoo-zoo, which have become the rage of the nation.In fact, why just products, even people have begun to sell themselves as brands, be it the ‘S Square’ by Shilpa Shetty, signature stuff from Levi Strauss or the superhero Akshay Kumar. Everyone is in the desperate spirit to fix themselves in the memory of audiences. As we say in media, the memory of audiences is very short, so to stay back you have to be visible and creditable. Companies need to understand that it is not just the face they need to establish, but also the quality. It is not just a hit that Pears soap still stands out of the other brands, relishing its 220 years old history.