At the other end are a
new breed of mobile, successful, aspiring newage professionals who wish to engage in both
work and play. Some of them view hotels as their self-expression, while others are escape
seekers and want to feel pampered. Responding to these segments can have varied
implication on investments. From this, emerged the ‘value rate’ hotels and the
‘boutique hotels’ depending on where the business was seeing its long term
gains.
Probing the Consumer
The core measure of success for all
brands is a happy and delighted consumer. And therefore the gruelling task facing all
marketers today is to understand the consumer far better than the consumer knows himself.
This is the key to all success. Anyone who wants to build a great brand first has to
understand who the consumers for this brand are. You can’t do this by getting a group
of executives in a room so that they can reach some consensus on who the consumers are.
Because whatever they come up with might well be inconsistent with the way the majority of
targeted consumers perceive the brand. The real starting point is to go out to the
targeted consumers and find out what they like or dislike about the brand and what they
associate as the very core of the brand concept. Now that’s a fairly conventional
formula - and it does have a risk: if you follow that approach all the way, you’ll
end up with a narrowly focused brand. To keep a brand alive over the long haul, to keep it
vital, you’ve got to do something new, something unexpected. It has to be related to
the brand’s core position. But every once in a while you have to strike out in a new
direction, surprise the consumer, add a new dimension to the brand, and re-energize it. Of
course, the other side of the coin is true as well: a great brand that knows itself also
uses that knowledge to decide what not to do.
Consumers are looking for something that
has lasting value that is relevant to their innermost needs. Theirs is a quest for
qualitative value, and not quantity. And for those behind the scene, brand building today
will not depend on a creative press ad, or a catchy jingle or a great TV commercial only
but on the quality of effort and care taken the whole organization to create and present
the brand.
Sumit Ray is a Chemical
Engineer from Jadavpur University and did his post graduation in Business Management from
IIM (Calcutta). His first stint at Tata Steel was for 8 years after which he worked at
Lintas and then at Reliance Infocomm before returning in September 2003. He is a Chevening
Scholar to the Manchester Business School and has been on a Rotary International
Scholarship to the USA. He is currently Head : Branding and Distribution in the
Distribution and Branded Products Group in FP (M&S), Kolkata. He has taught at several
Management Institutions in Kolkata.
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Kabir Seth, a product of
the Doon School and a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Delhi, joined Tata Steel
in 1971 and has headed the marketing functions of Tubes, Agrico, Secondary-products,
Cement and Coated Products divisions of the Company. He has headed the Brand Management
function since its inception in April 2000 and is presently Chief - Brand Management &
Corporate Marketing. Tata Tech 13 and 14 carried his articles on the subjects of Branding,
Human Behaviour, and Cash Management. These are still used as training material by TMDC.
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