In an age of accelerating product proliferation, enormous customer choice, and growing clutter and clamour in the marketplace, a great brand is a necessity, not a luxury. While that realisation has finally dawned on the majority of companies, the key question they are still struggling with is how to build strong brands? Leading marketers including Mr Shunu Sen, CEO, Quadra Advisory Services, Ms Sue Evans, princiapl consultant, retail practice, AT Kearney, and others gave an insight on the topic while speaking at a seminar on ‘Branding and its Strategy’ organised by Faculty of Management Studies, University of Delhi. The seminar which traced the lifespan of a brand through three sessions focused on brand creation, brand sustenance and reinvention of a brand. Setting the first session ‘Birth of a brand’ rolling, Mr Sen said that he’d define a brand as a product, organisation or a persona that has a unique set of associations attached to it. Citing the Business Week survey of the best known brands and identified that all of them (barring GE) were product offerings but they constituted much more than that. The ability to charge a premium price, he said, is a charactersitic feature. “Branding enables the producer, the consumer and the market benefits they otherwise would not have had.” According to Mr Sen, the first instance of branding is the wildwest practice of branding the cattle and livestock. Mr Santosh Desai, executive vice president, McCann Erickson India opined that branding is an act of creation, the act of conceiving benefits beyond the product. Brand according to him is a pattern of reputation around an innovating idea. Among other examples he identified Virgin (”…cheeky revenge of the underdog..”) and Amitabh Bachhan (”…anger of the marginalised..”) as strong brands. According to him, marketing as a discipline errs when it looks at consumer as merely a rapacious beast who consumes..” He insisted that consumers be looked at as human beings, too. Taking the audience through the branding process of Boost in a span of 16 years, Sucheta Govil, geenral manager, Nutritional Healthcare, GlaxoSmithKline outlined the transformation of Boost over the years right from shifting from mom-and-son focused advertising to using Kapil Dev to Sehwag to Sachin. “To me, in short, branding is creating a commercially successful brand property for the company. To achieve that you have to think radically different,” she said.

Jan. 15 - KOLKATA, India - national telecommunications regulator, Training, plans for the implementation of the Carrier Access Code (CAC), to customers the freedom to choose the service provider for long-distance calls, according to the Government The prospect of a plan for India on the PSU Des telecommunications operators.

“We can go further Carrier Access Code for long-distance calls and international (ISD). But we expect the announcement of the government concerning India, One,” Training chairman, Pradip Baijal told journalists in the city on Saturday . He was participating in the Business School’s ICFAI top of the 2006 strategy.

The government had earlier announced that India A plan for the telecommunications giant PSU BSNL, but it is still a final decision on it, while the private operator Reliance Infocomm has already, the scheme enables its customers for calls n ‘anywhere to any mobile phone in the country Unlike - 1 per minute. Baijal said, it is expected that the other players to follow the face of intense competition in the telecom circle.

Training has also concluded a consultation paper on the validity of the life of the systems are different mobile operators and service to the decision within a month, he said.

The lifespan of the validity of the plans announced by service that was formerly under the control of coaches, looking for indications of the regulatory authority of the costs, revenues from transport and service companies.

Training said the lifespan of the validity of the pricing plans announced recently by a number of mobile operators, underline the following topics: the long-term viability and sustainability of these projects, regardless of their useful life can exceed the balance of the licence period of the operators and if not, in their different plans for the applicable period.

He also raised questions about what would happen to the plans in the event that major changes in the transport sector and models of InterConnect regime of user charges.