Volume 13, Number 3 Article by Shombit Sen Gupta / P N Thirunarayana, Mithileshwa September 2001
Brands and the Art of Living :
P N Thirunarayana, Mithileshwar Jha and Y L R Moorthi
To provoke, to understand, to buy: this forms the essence of the ‘PUB Reflex’, a manifestly successful branding strategy that begins with differentiation. Artist, designer and brand guru, Shombit Sen Gupta, founder of the Paris-based Shining Strategic Design, with a list of clients that reads like a corporate who’s who, conversed with P N Thirunarayana, M Jha, Y L R Moorthi and N Balasubramanian on a wide range of issues from the art of branding to aesthetics and creativity. With his unusual background (the son of a communist party leader and a schoolteacher, he was brought up in a refugee colony in Bengal), Sen Gupta has a refreshingly different point of view. He holds forth on why ‘premium’ is a bad word in today’s democratic consumer world, what makes branding a responsible art that contributes to the upgradation of the consumer’s life, and how one carefully thought-out symbol can mean all things to all people. The secret lies in connecting the rational and the emotional and fusing them into a symbol that provokes the sub-conscious mind. Sen Gupta’s philosophy is reflected in his ‘Pyramid of Consumption’ in which he asserts that a product must traverse up and down from the vital, through comfort and pleasure, to the spiritual aspect, in all socio-economic levels, to make a lasting mark. Discovering the vital space of the brand is the first step in establishing a good marketing strategy. This will support all the other business interests of the company, and enable the brand to position itself at all levels of the pyramid by adding pluses to each level. Trained as an artist, Sen Gupta combines an appreciation of the sense of colour and style found in Indian villages with the aesthetics that produced masters like da Vinci, and this is reflected in his work. He also speaks at length about the Indian brand scene, what’s good, what’s not, what Indian managers need to do, what academics should be giving their students, and the importance of developing a dedicated central marketing team, working in the corporate house, that creates the vision of the brand and decides on the strategy.
Reprint No 01303
