The death of a Brand

“Your service to mankind is over, now you should rest in peace”, the God ordered him as if it were a mere puppet in his arms. “But why should I die”, he resonated back with equal force. “There are still people whom I haven’t served. Some even do not know how I taste. What substance am I made of! Where did I come from!
I can’t go into the junkyard so fast. There are older counterparts of mine who still decorate the shelves of the rich. They still give them a reason to live. They are still money’s worth. I am no coward. I have a personality of my own. I have a name. Should you not let my name be remembered by those whom I served on command? I have done a good job all my life. My mamma says this to me all the time. Should I not give her back my worth? You can’t take me away so fast”

“Dear son but you were never born. Let me tell you that you are nothing but a mere spirit. You have no form, no shape. You exist in the minds of the people and continue to live there until a more dominating spirit takes guard in the defense of his memory. There you lie dormant in his subconscious until a monster known as desire that raises out of the soul of man whips your back. Then there he goes searching for you in your worldly form. He recollects where he saw you last time. He follows his instinct and picks you off the right self. Puts you in his gunny bag and retires to his wife’s command. Little does he know that he is giving up to a spirit! Who, ones his role is over will transcend into another physical form. Without giving him even a hint.”

“But why such cruelty on me Lord? I loved the body you gave me. I loved the place I occupied. I had a nice time mingling with my clones. I have so many brothers and sisters. We all look so alike. Why do you want to take me away from my family?”

“Child you have done your task magnificently, you stood by your promise. Everybody will remember you for that. You were a great experience for the mankind you served. But every living thing that does his task efficiently lives a short life. Mankind needs change fast, faster than you can change form. Let me remind you that you were just a rationale to mankind, to convince that he had taken the right decision. Otherwise his wife will not stay with him. He has to behave bravely in front of her, to show her how intelligent he is. You were a proud possession for him. But now you should retire and let more dandy spirits take your place. The world wants change and it’s not your fault. Come let me find you another body”.

- Siddhartha Choudhary

Coming to think about it lately, much has been written about brands and there humongous existence in the every day world. Step out of your house and you will swear by it. The mammoth sized billboards on the streets will ache your neck till you figure out what it is all about. Kotler will tell you that for a brand to become successful it has to be able to coexist in your mind with everything else.

But with new companies sprouting out every now and then, the term Branding has taken a quite a lot of beating. Everything and anything is being promoted in the name of a brand and to gain entry into the corporate jungle, to eat up competition and sustain competitive advantage. Well, there has been quite a bit of time when I last saw a strong brand emerging. The most common brands that I remember in everyday existence are Colgate and Nokia. Both of which I am an ardent user of.

In a much debated discussion with my friend recently, the idea of God being promoted as a brand came up. The idea is not a new one and has been much talked about by marketing gurus across the globe for some time now, but is an interesting topic anyways. Just see the flexibility and ease with which god has been promoted across the world. Like beauty god has its own meaning and significance in the eye of the beholder. Religion has been sold successfully in the name of GOD. It’s a brand that has gained unquestionable popularity into the hearts of all. The story for the launch of God as the savior of the human race has been scripted beautifully by our ancestor’s long time ago. And it has stood the test of time.

Like any other marketing strategy the line Extension for the brand GOD has been crafted out beautifully. So for different needs you summon the relevant god. But what has made this brand so successful and sellable is the gravity with which every character has been drafted out. It takes quite a bit of imagination to draw the picture of a thin saint, residing in the Himalayas with hair so thick that it could contain the Ganges and a third eye, which ones opened could destroy the world. “Yes”, Lord Shiva is the greatest character sketches written in all time. Just imagine a saint having so much power and who could perform the dance of destruction so magnificently. I am always amazed with the sheer veracity with which this lord is described in the Vedas. I was also told that the first piece of advertising work to be recognized as a poster was a cave painting done by our ancestors millions of years ago. So is advertising really that old? Did at that time also man felt the need of his cultures and traditions to transcend boundaries and become popular. Our advertising Scriptwriters should really learn from the Vedas. How beautifully has our tradition been written! Ved Vyas and Tulsidas were to my opinion the greatest story writers ever. They have interwoven the epics so magnificently with life like characters that it is hard to forget them. I feel every script should be written as if it’s an epic in the making. Then only a story will fulfill the expectations of its audience.

Every brand is an epic in the making. And it’s the marketer’s job to see a brand till that point. Or else no great brand will emerge. A brand should at last keep fulfilling its customer’s expectations. That is what a brand is destined for. Which is equivalent of saying that God must keep on disposing the proposals of man. That is what it is destined to be doing. So many expectations have been carved out of this brand that we begin to develop a curse if anything goes beyond of what was expected from him. And our faith towards the brand withers a bit. Consistency is what we start looking in a brand. And to that call a brand must respond to. But aren’t we asking too much? Are we that consistent ourselves? I think we should let loose our expectations a bit and let God relax a bit! Wht say??

 

Right from the evolution of civilization, communication has been playing a major role in transmission of information. Information that is unique, accurate, objective, influential and powerful. If we are to cite some examples form the past of people who brought about a sea change in communication, then perhaps names like Mahatma Gandhi and Adolph Hitler come at the top of our minds. They have shown and equipped us with exact tools for effective communication. Mahatma Gandhi could influence thousands at one go even without the help of a microphone. Hitler, the god of black Propaganda spread his voice out like a magic bullet to manipulate the whole of Germany and the world. We have a lot to learn from them.

Public relation brings to us in this modern fast paced world, the right process to spread the news. News about how organization/individual is doing, covering all the possible events happening in the media, reporting the right stuff and so on and so forth. The role of PR as a communication vehicle is but huge and diverse. PR helps to bridge the gap between the organization and its stake holders/employees i.e. its internal and external environment. This is so very necessary in this age of globalization and cut throat competition.

Today the buzz word is achieving competitive advantage. And competitive advantage can be gained by spreading the right message, over and above effective production and processes. For this to take place the choice of the right medium is very necessary. We have at our disposal today a vast variety of media. Television, radio, internet, newspaper, journals have evaded our privacy from every possible direction. There’s a food for thought right here.

What I feel is that the role of PR is to translate information into responsible communication. By responsibility I mean the presence of some type of gut feeling mixed with integrity on the part of any public relations agency. And IPAN I think is on the verge of achieving just that. With its inception in 1988 it has ever since strived to produce responsible communication and facts show that it has done it with valor. What else do you ask from an agency that has turned around the face of PR in India and abroad? There are a dozen and more extremely experienced people heading the operations at IPAN. The PR icon of India Mr. Vivek Sengupta who is the president of IPAN stands for the change that IPAN has strived to bring about. Below him he has a group of matching professionals to help him achieve the company objective, working as heads of different IPAN offices in India. Serving clients like Reebok, Alcatel, Grasim, ITC, HBO is not always a cake walk. The company brings with it a unique approach towards addressing client’s problems and issues. The clients are always obliged working with such an organization which stands to achieve its vission,” with every success we hope to increase the acceptence of PR as the leading edge of an organizations communication strategy”.

 

 

Recently I was a witness to a new campaign launched at a Reebok stores in Bangalore. The occasion was the kick starting of a month long promotion as an initiative to boost retail sales, titled “Hit it with Rbk”. To kick start the event, one of the Brand Ambassadors for Reebok was present there in the name of Mahela Jayawardane. Yes, this star batsman and the skipper of the Sri Lankan Team was the limelight for the evening at the outlet and so was his wife Christina. The more or less sober looking gentleman came in at the store at just the right time irrespective of the traffic snarl.

Right from his setting a foot inside the store began the activities of briefing him about the event and what he ought not to forget to tell the media. He was regularly followed by a senior sales executive of the brand who set off immediately to show him the store. His wife was escorted to the women’s section to do some shopping as the PR officers kept the batsman busy briefing him for the media.

The stage was set as the media photographers started pouring inside the store to do their daily bit of ritual. Clicking pictures of the “ambassador” holding a Rbk cricket bat with the brand logo flashing at the camera as if stating loudly ” Take me, I am more important than the star”. And right it is in a way. “The brand is more important than the ambassador”, any marketing guru will tell you that. So there was our hero doing his bit for the brand in between heavy schedules for a series of cricket matches lined up for him. It was amusing to see the rather dictatorial captain who would not let anything loose on the ground being molded every now and then by the photographers to get the “right picture”. “Sir, if you could hold the shoe for a moment”, guided one photographer and others followed as if giving their invisible assent. The Sales executive seeing the opportunity to sell him some of the shoes interrupted in between, “Mahela, take this one, you always leave the shoe behind”. Our hero, in between posing for the camera quickly picked up some shoes and the ones he touched were considered sold by our executive.” I will get the right size for you done, don’t worry” confirmed our salesman, hungry to get in some sales. ” I want then fitted with half spikes”, the batsman made it clear and in a period of fifteen minutes a dozen pairs were lined up to be packed and dispatched with the cricketer.

Following this he was guided upstairs to the first floor where he got a sight of his wife after battling half an hour with the photographers and the sales guys. And what was up for grabs there was a bit more shopping, this time for his wife. Following the foot steps of her husband it seemed that his wife has also developed some fetish for shoes and she also quietly picked up a couple of pairs which the star nodding in agreement, hesitating to say “no” in front of the camera. So this followed for another twenty minutes with a media crew successfully pitching in an interview with our hero who was now already feeling agitated by the crowd that had gathered inside the store. Some soft drink was ordered to chill the couple and pitch in more sales. By this time the television crew had gathered downstairs to have an interview with him. At last something was going right. Our hero was there for an alleged brand promotion and not for shopping. He enthusiastically battled the topsy turvy questions of the media with a line or two about the brand. The media always have it their own way and our poor guy could not displease them. So it was more questions asked about his tour to India and less and less questions about the brand.

By this time our PR personnel had started getting a headache. “Promote the event man, talk about the brand, he gushed out at the media maintaining dignity and decorum. But all was done and the clock signaled 6.00 p.m. It was time for our exhausted hero to depart into his den. He smilingly waved his hand to the crowd and signaled good bye to the now happy sales manager, who put his hand forward for a handshake. “Thanks for the shoes”, our hero said pausing a bit and then quoting to the manager, “you know I have started playing golf lately”. “Why didn’t you tell me that before? We have an entire range of golf collection ready up there”. Our hero could hardly smirk at this. Boarding his Tavera he waved final good bye to the crowd only with an office staff running in as the gate was about to close, “here are the golf shoes, I am sure you would love them”.

Written as seen,

Siddhartha Choudhary

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.