Why you need a brand book and how to get it right? | Bobby Pawar, Kaushik Prasad and Subhash Kamath [#5]

Subhash Kamath (0:02)

I don't think consumers differentiate between 85, 95, and 90

Bobby Pawar (0:08)

At the top, there's only room for one, right?

Subhash Kamath (0:10)

I believe in India, 80 percent of celebrity usage in advertising that I see is not thought to be. Creating is easy.

What to create is a million dollar question.

Vani (0:23)

You're listening to Marketing with Vani, in which I speak to marketing gurus. Together, we decode how marketing works in the real world to grow your business.

Do you know the difference between brands that last, brands that you admire versus brands that come and go or don't make an impression on you? In today's episode, we will discuss what it takes to create an iconic brand like Coke, Pepsi, Apple, Colgate or Kulkure. The starting secret to building a strong brand is what we call a brand book.

We have three huge stalwarts explaining the what, why and how of the brand book. Listen on to my conversation with Bobby Pawar, Chairman, Habas Group, one of India's top advertising agencies, Kaushik Prasad, who was heading consumer marketing for Ford India, and Subhash Kamath, CEO, BBH and publicist, also chairman ASCII. We'll start with, you remember the last discussion we had with the IIM kids. And at that time, we were talking about whether brand consistency means monotony.

Bobby Pawar (1:34)

I see a lot of times people saw the mistake consistency in the sense of, well, the logo should always be right. And then, you know, the format should always be the same. That's the photocopy version of consistency, right? That, especially in today's, you know, always pretty much mostly engaged kind of where we live in.

That if you do that, you're going to be boring, right? The consistency comes from your visual grammar and your tone.

Vani (2:13)

So, you talked about consistency as being consistent visual grammar.

It must have the same tone of voice. It must have the same values that the brand stands for consistently. And do you think there's also merit in doing a brand book? Like when I was a brand manager, we used to be obsessive about it.

And then, of course, I spent many years at Unilever. And Unilever can be fairly anal about it. We had a brand book, especially on international brands, like the one that we had on Dove or on Lipton. There was absolutely everything very, very regimentally dictated in, whether it was for a print ad or even for any other ad, I mean, if we did a 30-second TBC. And I remember again, now that I'm talking to you, in my early days at Leo Burnett, when we used to do campaigns for Coke, we used to write short by short objectives for every shot. You know, when we used to write the script, and then the script would be handed over to the client servicing team, and we used to be sitting and racking our heads and be writing short by short objectives and be debating amongst ourselves on how will the brand come alive in this shot.

Bobby Pawar (3:31)

So, you know, my view on brand books is this, right? Most brand books are built to constrain, right?

They're built to, you know, hey, this is draw the borders around the brand, right? I think for like for any great piece of a great idea, great, any great idea for a brand, I think it needs to have a tension. So to me, I think great brand books do have that tension. They constrain and they liberate, right? And we must be mindful of designing what the how it looks as well as how it speaks to that effect.

Vani (4:19)

But would you would you agree that having a brand book greatly helps to guide creative on what the brand is about? Like if I had to brief creative, let's say there is a there is a new creative resource on the account.

And I'm struggling to explain what this brand is about.

Bobby Pawar (4:41)

You know what, Vani, you are dead on right. And especially now at these times when a brand is touched by multiple creators, the necessity of the brand book is that much greater.

The thing is that a lot of people don't do it simply because it requires a lot of rigor and discipline to do it. You have to make choices and choices are hard. A lot of people and marketing folks are people. They can't give up.

Things. And that's the problem. It has to constrain and liberate. So when people look at this thing, they want the 10 commandments. Now the 10 commandments tell you what not to do. But where's the inspiration in that? Where's this thing that, hey, this is where you could go? I've written for AT&T Wires and Wrigley's and I've written those things. But we were mindful, it's not just me, the planners involved and all of that. And we were mindful about, because eventually, if you have to create the stuff, is that there's enough meat in that. You need the bone, but you also need the meat.