Managing Brands for success

Brands are critical for saccess of the company. A Brand name gives the company much needed recognition with the customer with customer associating a brand with a quality or attribute he admires or desires of. To be a successful brand it becomes essential for company to associate themselves with the weakness of the customer and continuously stroke it to gain successive purchases and promotion for the brand. Companies spend huge amount of money to gain Image in the minds of customers and potential customers and resulting output is in most cases not clearly defined or measurable. Often it is not clear how much the money spent on promoting the brand actually effected the customer and influenced him towards the brand.

Managing multiple brands is even more complicated in the sense that these brands should not create confusion in the minds of customers. The company must be clear in its communication to the customers and these communication should be targeted accurately to the different customer segmentation accurately and the company must have the behaviour analysis of every customer segment in a very accurate manner. The emphasis on accuracy in communication is key since mis-commnication would result in confused customer, lost opportunities and wasted marketing efforts.

Today there is greater stress on marketing productivity and returns for the investment spent on marketing. The fact huge amount of money was spent by companies in past with failed products in the past have CEO's stressing on the result-oriented marketing. The rush for fast results has created tendencies of marketeers trying to rush potential customers to quick action through vigorous promotion and burnout syndrome in unprepared customers due to hurrying through the various stages of customer selection processes. Customers do need sufficient and unpredictable amount of time to make up their mind and transition through various phases in product selection process.

Brand managers who tend to produce results in long run are often considered outdated and there is emphasis on the need for brand managers to create brands in short span of time and produce results for the company. The shortening of the product life cycles and emergence of new products in shorter spans of time results in cluttering of products and completion for targeted customers. The bombarding of the customer with frequent and boisterous campaigns results in customer fatigue and burnout.

Customers entertainment space hence gets jammed with these promotions resulting in customer aversion for newer brands resulting in lesser effective even the most creative advertisements. Companies must look into strategies of de-congesting the customer's entertainment space and elongating brand life time and product life time and allowing more time for customer to stay in each of the selection processes without having him hurrying through these processes adding more value to the customer with appropriate selection and higher value to the company with more satisfied customers.

RBI's central role in macro-economic activity

Big countries do not change overnight. Change is a continous process of constant communication to citizens on need to change and happens one day at a time. Each passing day the emphasis on change brings about change in the mindset of citizens causing them to change the way they do things. When thousands of people in the country start changing, the country has automatically changed.

The commitment made in the last Budget was that the fiscal deficit as a percentage of GDP will be 5.5 per cent in 2010-11. RBI needs to support the government borrowing programme, as well as the growing demand for credit from the private sector. exchange rate movement during the last couple of years — from a bottom of around Rs 52 (a dollar) to a top of Rs 39. massive swings in the exchange rate are disruptive, as many participants in the market do not have the capacity to mitigate foreign exchange risk. GDP trend rate of growth is in the 8-9 per cent range. If the economy grows beyond that trend, that is overheating. We cannot remain over the trend for a long period of time without stoking inflationary pressure, for the simple reason that the economy does not have the capacity to grow faster than that rate. Dr. Subir Gokarn, Deputy Governor, RBI, Interview with Business Standard,

For a public policy institution like the Reserve Bank, there is no final destination; the goal posts keep moving with new challenges and tasks replacing current ones. The learning too never stops. From each development and crisis, lessons are drawn and applied to policy and institutional reform