We've to be careful not to shock clients: Charles Wright

As head of the Dubai office of Wolff Olins, Wright has also successfully managed several Indian brands such as Tata, Airtel, Tata Docomo, Hero MotoCorp and Hinduja-Ashok Leyland. In an exclusive interview with afaqs!, Charles Wright, managing partner of Wolff Olins speaks about which Indian brands are noteworthy and the attitude of Indian businesses towards brand revamps.

Edited Excerpts

There is a snob appeal about using companies from London and New York. But for us, servicing Asian clients from London came at an extra cost. Hence, Dubai was chosen as an ideal location. Sooner or later, we will have an office in India, and Mumbai is the preferred place.

In terms of the portfolio, India would be less than 10 per cent of our business. However, we have been active in India only for three years now, although Wolff Olins has worked with the Tata Group since the late '90s.

Two years ago, we were not so well-known in India. But now, with Tata Docomo and Hero MotoCorp, we are beginning to get noticed and much of the work we are winning here is through recommendation.

Indian clients prefer hiring foreign people. They do it through a mix of blue and brown eyes - a mixture of Europeans and Indians. That also brings in a mixture of experience, along with understanding of the markets.

There are some funny things that I have observed. Some clients are so reticent that even when their work is launched, they will prevent us from talking about it.

I really do not know. Probably they are just shy to reveal about working with us.

Typically, there is some kind of brief and an ambition that a client defines. Then, we try to understand what the business is trying to achieve and the role that the brand has got to play in its success. If the brand is critical to the business, everything else is pretty much in place. In the case of Hero, for example, the brand is the product itself. Everything else supports that.

One reason why many British companies lost during the industrial decline was that they failed to realise that the quality of the product matters. German companies, on the other hand, understood it very well. German managers will look at you very oddly if you say that you can build a brand around the quality of a product. For them, engineering is given and it is also obvious that the engineering has to be good. Even BMW in Germany talks about the joy of driving -- it doesn't speak about being a driving machine.

I have been extremely impressed with the quality of CMOs in India. The day they start packaging their expertise and selling it abroad, people like us will be in trouble. There are some fantastic ad agencies in India and the kind of campaigns that you see here are at par with anything in the West.

But, even so, branding here -- to a lot of companies -- means a logo and a good ad campaign. I suspect that it is not enough -- not any longer.

The concept of branding differs with the industry. In telecom, for instance, it is not just about making a brand promise, but the delivery of the promise, as well. To be fair, many American and European companies, too, are struggling to be good service brands.

Branding has to translate into all the functions of a business -- human resources, the operations and the servicing. In a hotel, for instance, branding could mean how a doorman greets you at the door.

That's a US$64,000 question. Hero MotoCorp believes that it can mark significant footprints in two-wheelers, internationally. On the banking front, I think HDFC and ICICI. In airlines, if you had asked me three years back, I would have said, Kingfisher. Not now. Five years ago, it was probably Jet.

In terms of B2B, it would be Wipro, Infosys and Tata Consulting.

Airtel. It has spent a large amount of time and money in putting the red identity across India. It doesn't matter whether you like it or not, it is still there and it is very strong. I also feel that what Vodafone is doing is much better than what it could achieve anywhere else. The Zoozoo was fantastic. It cut through all barriers of language and culture.

Yes, compared to international standards. But, that has to do with comfort and confidence. We always have to be careful not to scare or shock the clients.

Docomo's is a case in point. I was pleasantly surprised that it agreed to go for a colourful logo. The point was that it didn't have a lot of choice. It was the 12th or the 13th mobile company and it had to do something pretty brave to stand out.

The next phase of branding in India is about operations. It is also about the kind of people I hire and how I reward them. We have to make sure that the whole company works together, not just the marketing department.

What is required is an arrangement between marketing and HR, for example -- or marketing and operations -- which is good for a customer because there is nothing more frustrating than to sign up for something whose promise is great, but the reality is not what one expected.