Building, Nurturing and Managing Brands

One of the earliest applications of branding was branding cattle. In modern times, branding started in right earnest with P&G’s efforts in the 1930s. When Nestle bought confectionary company Rowntree, it paid 4.5 billion dollars not for the latter’s plant and machinery or infrastructure but its brands like Kit Kat. Brand is important because it adds value to a product and forestalls commoditization. Marks and Spencer earn in pounds because they own the brand. Its contract manufacturers probably make pennies because they sell the product. That is the difference between the product and the brand. So, the fundamental questions for this program are –

i) How to convert a product into a brand? ii) How to build a sustainable brand? 

Consider the following questions –

• how to build a resilient brand identity?
• What is brand equity? How to gain brand equity?
• Are services branded in the same fashion as products? How is service branding different?
• Are brand extensions a boon or bane? How far to extend a brand?
• How to build a corporate brand?
• How to build a cult brand?

These are some of the topics to be discussed over a 3-day period in the program

• A broad understanding of branding as a discipline
• A set of principles that can be used for building new brands and nurturing old brands
• A selection of conceptual frameworks for different aspects of branding like brand identity, brand equity, brand extensions, corporate branding and services branding

Presentations, class room exercises using templates, participant presentations of their learnings, discussion of multiple real-life cases of branding

• Senior and middle level marketing, sales and brand managers who want to acquaint themselves with brand management or sharpen their knowledge of the domain
• Top management who are not basically from the marketing function but would like to know how to build a brand
• Entrepreneur CEOs interested in brand building and are not familiar with the techniques of branding

YLR Moorthi is a Professor, Marketing at IIM Bangalore. He has a PhD in Brand Management. He is an M Tech from IIT Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM Bangalore, India He teaches Brand Management, Marketing Management and other marketing courses. His areas of interest include Marketing Strategy, Markets for Hi-tech Products and Branding. He was awarded a PhD for his thesis ‘Brand Success Evaluation in Selected Personal Care Products’. The thesis studied 73 personal care brands from the Indian market. He worked for several years in the industry in varied fields like Production Planning, Oil Exploration, Mechanical Design, Systems Analysis, Software Development, etc.

He has conducted training programmes and consulted for several reputed Indian and multinational companies. His workshops on innovation and creative marketing are popular among corporates. He has also consulted for organizations abroad like Industry Canada and IBM, USA. He is currently actively involved in research on the impact of branding in different domains like IT and B2B Marketing. His latest publication is his book “Marketing that works in India” published by Pearson Education in 2015.