Branding Vizag

October 2014

Branding Vizag

In the recent past, there has been quite some talk of branding Vizag. While branding appears to be a straight forward exercise, the fact is that it involves considerable research, strategy, creativity and long-term marketing discipline.

Leave it to the professionals

The tricky thing about branding is that once it has acquired a set of attributes it becomes difficult to change. For example, would you be comfortable with a soft drink called “Dettol” or a motorbike called “Colgate”?  Brands take years to build and cost a lot of money. In fact, brands constitute a large portion of the value of a company. They are zealously protected and very often the brand is more important than other assets that an organisation may have.  Branding products and services is complicated enough but branding a city is an even more difficult proposition. That is why branding must be handled by professionals with deep understanding and experience of the subject.

What Vizag should convey and who is our target segment?

One of the first steps to take is to decide what the idea of “Vizag” should convey.  For nearly eight decades Vizag actually had a brand promise in the phrase “City of destiny”. It is perhaps time to consider a more contemporary quality.  Before we do that we must ask ourselves a couple of simple questions … who are we branding for and what we expect to gain from the branding? Let us take two examples. If we want to promote Vizag as a city that is great for the industry we will have to brand it with a set of attributes such as proactive government, plenty of electrical power, good communications, and qualified workforce. If we want to promote Vizag for tourism we would probably concentrate on another set of attributes such as beautiful scenery, friendly people and interesting culture. In each case, we are branding for a certain segment of customers.

Sharper focus on segments

Let us continue with the example. Once we have broadly selected our target customer we will have to focus even more sharply on segments within the segment. For example, if we are pitching our city to the IT industry we must plan our communication to appeal to that particular industry. Similarly we will have to focus sharply on a particular group of tourists, for example if we were appealing to the “yuppie” (Young Urban Professional) tourists, our communication would be quite different from that to the religious segment. The decision on which sub-segment we should focus on would depend on who will benefit the city most by way of say, employment potential or revenue with the the least impact on our natural resources.

Branding for tourism

In most cases cities, states or even countries are branded to attract tourists. Who hasn’t heard of “Incredible India” or “God’s Own Country”? We must admit at this stage that Vizag as a city has no well-defined tourism strategy. The scary part is that when it comes to branding for tourism every person and his grandmother has an opinion and everyone is an expert. There has also been some talk of entrusting the branding exercise to university academicians. Those who understand branding think that this would be a serious mistake. This is not the time to place such an exercise in the theoretical domain. Branding for tourism must be undertaken only by experts in branding and marketing from the corporate sector in association with a panel of concerned citizens and officials from the city. It will involve image consultants, advertising agencies, travel industry specialists, and communications & marketing professionals. All this will cost money and budgets must be ready for the exercise. We must start with a core group who understand what the city needs right from the start and are able to brief the experts on the scope of work. Most importantly bureaucracy and politicians must keep their hands off the process and only act as facilitators.

Will Vizag deliver on its brand promise?

Branding is not a magic wand; we cannot sell a lousy product with branding alone. If the product is shabby, branding may help sell it once but never twice. A McKinsey report finds that dissatisfied customers tell 15 others of their bad experience whereas a satisfied one will tell only 6 others. Honesty is paramount, therefore whatever the brand communication is; it must reflect reality. It is most important to ensure that Vizag as a product not only meets but exceeds expectations. That is why it is crucial that those wishing to brand Vizag spend some time preparing the city to deliver the brand promise.

The branding process and after

The process of branding, very briefly, would have to go through the following stages:

• 1.      Research to select which of Vizag’s attributes can work best for achieving our objectives
• 2.      Deciding who we should pitch our message to
• 3.      Preparing a comprehensive brand identity including the brand promise and a logo
• 4.      Educating the city administration and all stakeholders about what our brand promise is and making sure that everyone aligns with the core message
• 5.      Preparing an advertising campaign and budgeting for it for the next 5 years … brands take a long time to build
• 6.      Ensuring that the brand is never diluted, distorted or misrepresented
• 7.      Inculcating a pride in the brand that percolates into the local community and becomes a part of their psyche

Step forward boldly but wisely

This then is the short story of what is involved in branding. Once we appreciate the nuances of the exercise and are prepared to hand it over to professionals we will be on a safe path. The next time someone exclaims “let’s brand Vizag!” we should know what we are getting into. While it is a challenging project the benefits will certainly be worth every rupee spent on it. Let’s step forward boldly but wisely.