Go Beyond Sales To Stay Ahead

Companies need to imbibe a service-oriented culture as customerempathy and engagement matter most in the long run.

- Devashish Das Gupta

Managing product brand, as well as corporate branding, has become a challenging area. Today, each firm is making efforts to increase brand equity and public relations (PR) has emerged as the favourite tool. Social media is the most-soughtafter medium now for making the correct noises at the right time and places. Moreover, of late, corporate social responsibility and its different offshoots have been sought after as a part of the PR strategy.

Researches of David Aaker and Jean-Noël Kapferer are still very relevant when it comes to brand management. However, firms in India have moved far ahead when it comes to establishing and maintaining a sustainable competitive edge through brand equity. Interestingly, with the ever-increasing array of product variants and brands, customers were never more confused than now. To top it all, an incessant barrage of marketing communications has created complete chaos. Social media chatter and paid blogs are giving a rich flavour to this clutter.

To be seen as a responsible/preferred brand in the market, firms have gone too deep into complex, strategic thinking. Another dimension that has created a double whammy for business leaders is that all these exercises have been tied to some tight and tangible sales targets. Nowadays, most of the Indian firms are driven by year on-year and month-on-month sales figure comparisons. But then, if every step that a company takes is tied to an increase in sales, we become too myopic. This trend was identified and very well presented by Theodore Levitt in his celebrated work titled ‘Marketing Myopia’, published in the Harvard Business Review.