Angara Launches
Friday, August 18, 2006
A few months ago, I mentioned that I was helping create and launch a new luxury brand focused on a speciality area. This week, we launched Angara, what I hope will become the world’s leading online luxury retailer for diamonds and fine jewelry.
Angara’s value proposition is simple: diamonds are industry-driven purchases, and its hard to differentiate between all the offers out in the marketplace. Our research showed that consumers were intrigued by the concept of buying diamonds online, and loved the idea of lower prices, but they don’t want to compromise on the intangibles: feeling good about their purchase, great packaging, classy presentation, and friendly customer service. Angara, through all of its services and features (some are forthcoming) aims to provide the simplest, most inuitive and classiest way to buy quality diamonds and jewelry online.
From a marketing perspective, we ended up finding some really interesting mechanisms to make the value proposition come to life. For example, we convened a team of diamond experts and consumer novices to understand how to enhance the construct of the “4Cs”. Historically, the diamond industry used the 4C’s to set prices and create comparability. In reality, there are several other parameters used to determine the quality of a diamond: symmetry, polish, girdle, table, etc. That’s why two diamonds that have almost identical 4Cs may differ in price. Keeping all this in mind, Angara created a rating system for the quality of diamonds that’s based on the 4Cs (well, 3Cs since “carat” is an indication of weight and not quality) as well as a dozen other parameters that affect the quality of a diamond. The result is a Zagat-style rating on a scale of 1-100 called The Angara Rating.
It feels like I’ve given birth! Lots more work to do, but it really does feel good to have it out there and living!
On Creating a Premium Brand
Saturday, February 25, 2006
My past few months have been peppered with several conversations around the creation of premium brands, and I’ve decided to pen some opinions on what really constitutes components of a luxury brand, specifically as it applies to consumer products and the retail experience.
First of all, “luxury” isn’t what it used to be. Credit cards and the function of borrowed equity have created opportunities for purchase that no longer allow luxury brands to be defined just by the demographics that buy their products and services. In 2005, more people filed for bankruptcy in the US than graduated from college. People live on the borrowed edge, and communication vehicles are so disjointed now that it is impossible to catch one customer at all her accessible points. Heck, we don’t even know what they are anymore.
In the future economy, luxury brands are not going to be those that just sell at a premium price and have celebrity endorsements. Luxury brands are going to be defined by a combination of innovation and image, where innovation can be either within the product or the services that surround the purchase process.
Prada acknowledges this, and the retail experience in their 5th avenue store uses RFID tags to create tangible, awe-inspiring value in the shopping process—translucent dressing rooms automatically darken when you enter, and the tags automatically bring up images of other products in the store that match the choices you’ve brought into the dressing room.
In general, when a brand has a high-end image but supplements that image with high innovation, a premium brand can be built because the perception of value exceeds the price paid for the product. With low innovation, it then becomes incumbent upon the brand to build a significant amount of trust with the customer in order to justify higher prices. This is why, for the most part, luxury brands that currently thrive without much service or product innovation have mostly been established several decades ago.
Every situation is different, and there is no specific blueprint for the creation of a new premium brand. However, the consultants at Booze-Allen published these four key parameters, which I generally agree with:
- Distinction: Something that is differentiating from mass brands and not just a created image. For example, in the gifts category, Red Envelope uses its “product story” and red gift box and clearly differentiating elements. So much so that you must pay an additional $4.95 in order to GET that red gift box with your order.
- Communication:Specifically, word-of-mouth, and not advertising. Premium brand customers believe other premium brand customers, and brands that capitalize on the stories that enter the cultural ecosystem tend to do better at creating a luxury brand faster. SKY Vodka capitalized on the rumor that their vodka caused less hangovers than other competitive brands.
- Tangibility of the Retail Experience: Premium brands require a premium experience at the point of sale. Steve Jobs knew that he wasn’t going to be able to get most department or electronic stores to truly represent the brand he was creating, and therefore decided to launch individual, company-owned Apple Stores that had a very distinct shopping experience that supported the brand.
- Pricing: Of course, pricing for luxury brands must reflect the intended premium status and should therefore be higher than mass products in the same category, regardless of uniformity in manufacturing costs.
MTV and Popular Culture
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
I spent this past weekend at the national conference of the Network of Indian Professionals. NetIP is a unique group—it is an entirely volunteer run organization that puts on these incredibly robust conferences, where like-minded young Indian professionals can come together, network, socialize, and discuss issues that pertain to culutral identity, business, and India.
I won’t bore you with the details of what all the sessions included, but I was particularly intrigued by the introduction of a new brand—MTV Desi. I spent some time with Nusrat Duranni, the new head of MTV World, and the champion behind MTV Desi. (By the way, “Desi” originally meant “person of Indian origin,” but has now come to be a catchphrase for anything Indian.)
Nusrat is a gaunt, brooding, striking man who bears an uncanny resemblance to a young, sober Bob Dylan. When I first met him, he was fashionably dressed in a dark slim-fitting suit over a red shirt, with a pencil-thin black tie. I sat on a panel with him and the simply stunning Saira Mohan, where we discussed the emergence of the new Desi in popular American culture—the gradual recession of “Habib” as the Indian stereotype.
MTV Desi is an incredibly cool concept for several reasons, but not for those that most young Indians would be interested in. The acceptance of ethnic symbolism in popular culture has always required board platforms that created context for it. Take for example, the yin-yang symbol, or the medeival cross, or the Serpent and sceptre—these are all ethnic and religious symobls that have materialized in popular culture, and for periods of time, represented that particular age’s definition of “cool”. Now, with the advent of the Internet, and with a platform and catalyst as broad and powerful as MTV, we can surely see Indian symbols fast becoming part of the mainstream culture.
The trick that Nusrat and his team will have to master is not so much the creation of content; in fact, given that they’re in just about every country around the world, recycling content to create the “MTVization” that ethnic concepts need in order to be accepted by trend-seeking Americans will be easy; instead, the true test will be in their ability to create marketing platforms from which that brand inculcation can happen as rapidly and smoothly as possible. They will need to focus on different but inter-connected elements of brand-building (in my opinion, through the use of popular celebrities) that get trend-followers to start living the “desi” concept in their lives. DJ contests that focus on the best mixes that use MTV Desi music; and perhaps even licensing content to nightclubs so that imagery can start to become part of everyone’s leisure life.
Currently, MTV Desi is only available as part of DirectTV, but I’m hoping that they’ll get their cable deals done soon enough—it’s a fantastic concept, and I for one, am pleased as punch about it.
Welcome to the Revolution
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
I wrote this article as a guest columnist in the August 22nd issue of India Today.
A few years ago, the legendary Alyque Padamsee wrote that India needed to be re-branded. We were no longer the third-world country with striking images of poverty, but instead, he argued, the world’s Brain Trust. He suggested the political appointment of a Brand Ambassador who would be in charge of the communication elements that positioned India in the light in which it had found itself.
Whether Mr. Padamsee was vying for that job himself is a matter unimportant to the discussion. What’s relevant, however, is the sentiment behind his hypothesis: that first, in India’s healthy participation in scientific academia, and now in her burgeoning industry of outsourcing, we have found a proposition to re-position the country to the world.
The US private sector continues to find new ways to add to this panoply of low-cost outsourced services. It’s not just about call-centers and IT services anymore. Your medicine cabinet has drugs whose R&D now happens in India. Your local Pottery Barn has 95% of its furniture manufactured in India. Your live-chat representatives at Earthlink facing the orange glow of your frantic typing--they sit in India too. Accounting will follow, as will tax preparation. In fact, anything that doesn’t require physical proximity will one day work its way to a cheaper place. This is the ineludible stampede of work from paper blueprints to digital bitmaps.
The US has seen this cycle before. A hundred years ago, half the American population worked on farms. Those jobs migrated to manufacturing, and eventually to service. Now, those services jobs are migrating into management, design, architecture and planning jobs. Each of these migratory cycles has always had a happy ending. But they haven’t come without their share of angst, backlash and anxiety. And so while India’s outsourcing industry thrums with vibrant activity, a dark cloud of post-pink-slip American anger looms menacingly above.
For those displaced US workers, there is some solace in history. A few decades ago, there was another rapid migration that resulted in a massive loss of jobs, and the creation of an angst-ridden phase for the labor pool: the computer. As Chris Anderson of Wired puts it, yesterday’s “I was replaced by a computer” is today’s “They sent my job to India!” It is the nature of an industrial ecosystem to re-train itself. The continuum that is now disrupted by the advent of Indian knowledge workers shall once again be restored, albeit in a new direction, and with new tributaries.
But the real breakthrough is yet to come. In freeing up developmental dollars that were once spent in fixing issues and solving service problems, it is now possible for the global enterprise, courtesy of an efficient Indian machine, to spend those same dollars in innovation and research. Point releases give way to new product concepts. Statements of Work now give way to patent filings. Remote management of deliverables helps companies weed out potentially inept managers who have previously hidden behind disorganized masses of production propaganda. We are now freer to create.
Outsourcing, perhaps, is industrial evolution in its highest form. That evolutionary baton is now, happily enough, in India’s hand. And yet, for all our knowledge advancement, the infrastructural handicaps we work with remain: our cities teem with eager young programmers like hopeful starlets in Hollywood; our roads and sidewalks spill over with traffic; our basic utilities like water and electricity churn at the whim of random officials; and our politics seems to ignore the clearing in which we have found ourselves. It is India’s greatest irony that for a country that came together just fifty years ago to liberate itself with a conjoined battle-cry, we have migrated to an ecosystem in which each man is for himself.
Still, there is awe to be felt in watching the rapid ascension of India’s labor force. They’re at the hub of the world’s greatest economic disruption yet--the digital network that will comprise a modern corporation’s accounting, production, and analytical functions. Armed with nothing but a mouse and a keyboard, they’re the new warriors that have pulled the country out of its proverbial doldrums, dressed it up in its Sunday best, and like an army of Lilliputians, carried it forward into the global limelight.
Mr. Padamsee may not have known how rich India’s outsourcing future would become when he suggested that India be re-branded as the world’s Brain Trust. The reference, of course, comes from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s group of diverse academic advisors during the early part of his presidency. But India is more than just academia. India has proven to be an efficient engine that processes information quickly and provides stellar, working deliverables. Perhaps Mr. Padamsee wouldn’t mind if we amended his suggestion.
Perhaps, India, with all she is currently armed with, is better positioned as the world’s Superbrain.
What’s Your Name Worth?
I’ve spent the past few days naming a client’s business. They’re a high-end retailer in a very competitive category, and I’ve been driving myself batty crafting nomenclature for the business as well as for their services and product lines that fit with an overall value proposition to a very specific audience segment: style-conscious, upscale shoppers of a particular gender. (If you think I’m being vague, you’d be, um, right.)
It got me pondering about the nature of the naming business. Which, in case, you didn’t know, exists, and is one of the most ridiculously overpriced things you can buy from agencies crafty enough to sell it. My philosophy has always been that if nomenclature is required of a brand strategy project, it shouldn’t count exponentially over the other identity requirements. But I’m in a tiny camp, and the naming business thrives like you wouldn’t believe.
One of the craftiest perpetrators in the naming racket is Landor Associates, the company behind doozies such as Avaya, Avanade, astrium, and of course, the famous renaming of the Philip Morris holding company to, what else but, Altria.
But Landor’s greatest hit was a project that’s still snickered about in agency circles. When Hewlett-Packard decided to break-off its instrumentation division into a separate company to compete against arch rival Lucent, they hired Landor to find them a suitably grand name. Using processes momentously titled “Brand Alignment Process”, “BrandAsset Valuator”, “Random Visual Association Methodology,” they finally arrived a naming proposition that would allow the new company to be as strong as human nature—“indomitable and immutable.”
The name that all those lovely-sounding processes, 70 Landor executives, nine months, and $1,000,000 ended up with?
Agilent.
Hmm. Agilent.
If someone had paid me a million dollars, and asked me to create a company name that could compete against Lucent, Agilent sounds like a name I’d joke about. Here’s probably what happened at Landor.
“Hey, they’re ‘Lucent’, like a ‘lucid entity’, so how about we become something similar?”
“Yeah, like what?”
“Aw shucks, dunno, how ‘bout a “clear entity”, like Clearent, or an easily moving thing, like ‘fluid’, so perhaps we should call them Fluent.”
[Chuckling ensues.]
“Or a fast entity, like Fastent. No, no, wait… I have it. An agile entity, like Agilent.
[Loud laughter now.]
“Ha! I’d like to see you sell that baby in.”
“Oh, I bet I could.”
“Let’s bet on it.”
“What’re the stakes?”
“Tell you what Johnny boy. If you can sell Agilent in, I’ll let you name my new baby when Karen delivers in 7 months.”
Sadly, there’s now a little boy who toddles around, with the very Landor-like name of “Buoyant”.
Look, I’m not picking on Landor. I’m just pointing out that the ridiculous notion that you need to pay millions of dollars in fees and additional monies in extensive market research about a name for a major tech company is complete horse-poop. I understand research when your product needs to specifically tap into an ethnic or immigrant market, or if your name happens to be a word that might mean something in a language that’s offensive to people. I understand that, to a certain extent, you need to consider linguistics. And I understand completely that it now very difficult to find truly functional, usable names. Which is why people are now making up words like Jabberwocky, and JamCracker, and joining words together like Blue Nile and Raindance.
And of course, you need a name that doesn’t tread on other trademarks or copyrights. The legal implications of naming are truly frightening, and there are law firms that specialize in making sure you’re locked down and protected. Then of course, you have the added issue of the domain name being available. This was never truer in the US than for Nissan Motors, who decided to sit on their ass until 1996 before trying to register Nissan.com. In a battle they still haven’t won, they’ve been terrorizing Nissan Computer to give up the domain name.
But think about it.
If you were naming the most powerful software company in the world, would you call them Microsoft?
If you were naming a $13 billion environmental protection company, would you call it Waste Management?
If you were creating nomenclature for a country that wanted to change perceptions of being a haven for pedophiles and prostitutes, would you name it Thailand and Bangkok?
If you were naming the most powerful cable channel for teens and young people in the market today, would you call it Music Television?
If you were naming the world’s premier telecommunications company, would you call it AT&T? Wouldn’t you argue about whether the domain name was “guessable”?
My point is not that we should throw away our naming budgets and just come up with stuff without thought or research. All of the legal and cultural implications of names that I mentioned above are real, and need to be addressed. My point is that names, in the end, have very little to do with how brands eventually position themselves. PR, products, quality, imagery, brand associations, emotional context, messaging, and customer experiences have much more to do with the acceptance of a name than the name itself.
So, the next time you’re naming a product or service, spend a little less time arguing about whether everyone’s going to love the name, and a little more time thinking about how to make customers love your company and your service. And use the money you save in investing in better customer experience toolsets, both online and offline. You’ll thank me for it.