Brainstorming session: (L to R) Coca-Cola India's Sanjiv Gupta, ad-film maker Prahlad Kakkar, Professor Jagdish Sheth, McCann-Erickson's Santosh Desai, and Amoretto's Jayant Kochar at Business Today's Knowledge Management Forum

Daunting word, this-knowledge. All the more so when applied to business. It was a good thing, then, that Business Today's Knowledge Forum, on converting this precious intangible to hard cash, restricted itself to the management of intellectual assets in general, and brands in particular. The theme: 'Building Winning Brands'.

Restricted itself? Maybe not. Brands are brands. They are about as amenable to being restricted as an idea whose time has come. Much the same can be said about the views that marketers and academics have on managing brands. A perfect setting, then, for a good exchange of views among some of India's most renowned brand junkies. It was in the fitness of things too, that Seagate, exchange4media, and brandprophet, which helped put the forum together, were brand junkies too.

The forum's first speaker, Dr Jagdish Sheth, kicked off the morning session at The Imperial Hotel, New Delhi. "Consumer product marketers are way behind industrial marketers in understanding the branding process," said the good professor from Emory University's Goizueta Business School, creating an instant stir in the hall. "The only segmentation that works is price," he elaborated, "whilst consumer product marketers give too much spin to demographics, psychographics et al." Further, industrial marketers- think GE or ups-are masters of placing emphasis on the mother brand above all, and then extending it across product and service categories with élan. This works because to industrial marketers, branding is process-driven, rather than a programme run by some 'marketing department', and the brand values are reflected in everything that they do, across functions.

Jagdish Sheth Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Marketing, Goizueta Business School, Emory University, USA "Marketing was just an afterthought to manufacturing, and, therefore, never had a capital budget of its own, only an annual expense account. If you look at big brand companies, manufacturing/IT have brought down their costs tremendously, but no one yet speaks about productivity of marketing."

Sheth also attacked that other practice that's in vogue-of launching market-specific brands in markets with a different cultural context. The result? An expensive portfolio. "Most big brands in packaged goods are like huge mansions over the river Rhine," he scoffed, "Good to live and look at, but very high on cost maintenance." That's poor branding strategy, in his view, and it's so much better to have one big mother brand doing the job across the world. "The fact is, when people accept your brand, they begin disassociating strict cultural context from usage." Look at Wal-Mart, which has created a "truly classless brand" by ending the price-quality trade-offs that were being forced on shoppers. Doing this, he said, involves just about every part of the business.

That was just the right note for the next speaker, Coca-Cola India's Deputy President, Sanjiv Gupta, to begin addressing the issue of 'Value Creation'. His company, after all, is known to value branding on an almost philosophical plane-clearly something that occupies the management at the very top level. "What we do," began Gupta, "is strengthen the connection between the product and the consumer. It enriches the experience of the consumer whenever he or she interacts with the brand." In real terms, reinforcing the brand promise is a complex job, involving behind-the-scenes value creation through activities as diverse as water conservation and supply-chain efficiency, as well as the upfront engagement of the "passions of India" (cricket, for instance), which often needs different connectors for different parts of the country (Durga Puja in West Bengal, for example). Pricing isn't the cola focus.

And it's not just cola, for Gupta. There's the low-priced Sunfil powder to make soft drinks accessible to larger numbers, and the Georgia tea and coffee initiative-which has adapted its flavours to the country region by region. In Gupta's view, that's a pragmatic way to handle diversity, even if Sheth disapproves.

If passion-tapping is important, can consumer insight generation be far behind? That's precisely what Santosh Desai, President of Coke's agency McCann-Erickson India, spoke about. "To my mind," he began, "insight is elusive. It's difficult. It isn't a process thing. Insight is not about seeing new things, but seeing old things in a new way." In that sense, it's about originality. The sort, however, that could also be seen to be obvious. "It is retrospectively self-evident." The trick, he said, was not to let marketing get "too caught up in itself", but to explore "the other 98 per cent of our lives, as human beings" (rather than 'consumers').

Sanjiv Gupta Deputy President, Coca-cola India. "Where both brand and category development is high, we believe the focus should be on price positioning and the price target. Where category development is low and brand development is high, we need to develop relevant insights."

Any insight examples? Oh yes, Desai had plenty. Cricket as a "Brahminical sport", for one. "It's about superiority of form over content," he remarked, sending a light flutter through the hall. Then, more controversially, marriage. "It's about keeping intimacy at bay," he said, "it's a relationship between two families." And then, the nightie. In India, a symbol of "greasy modernism", yet fairly modest as a garment.

Perhaps not the ideal point for the former Lacoste man to begin his own speech. No problem. As the Chief of Amoretto's, a retail enterprise, Jayant Kochar spoke on the 'Service Attitude' rather than the social symbolism of garments. To him, "A brand denotes values and functions", but a brand must also have a personality, which ought to be created by the brand positioning (broadly, the stance it strikes in consumer mindspace). It can also be seen as arithmetic, he added. "Successful brands deliver value. Value is equal to benefit minus cost." How does a Rs 1,500 product deliver Rs 5,000 of value? Service.

Santosh Desai President, McCann-Erickson India "Brand value is nothing but the meaning that gets attached to the product. You have a product and it gets surrounded with additional meanings. So Coke is not just carbonated sort of water, but has a host of meanings associated with it."

"You've got to fight for share of time," continued Kochar, highlighting the key retail challenge. "Anything that keeps customers away is competition for us." Plus, a note of warning: getting preoccupied by the material aspects-the convenience, ambience and so on-risks a failure to "understand needs, communicate, empathise, care for, and entertain the customer".

Did someone say 'entertain'? Aha. That's a word that's almost synonymous with Prahlad Kakkar, an adfilm maker who's spent considerable time in the cola trenches. And true to style, his speech was a barrage of reality bytes. "You're only as good as your last job," he started, before making his case for letting brand integrity dictate the job. "No work is so important that you compromise dignity and professionalism. You should have such belief in yourself and your idea that you could walk away if others don't believe you."

It's all about ideas, said Kakkar, and there's no formula for that. Even if it looks nicely thought out and formulated later. "All rationalisation is done in the hindsight," insisted Kakkar, "But there are no rules. There are paradoxes to great ideas." A test of a good idea, though, is that it should transcend execution. Further, "There are no right or wrong decisions. There are only decision or lack of decision." And that's plainly a matter of courage.

	Jayant Kochar Managing Director AMORETTO'S "The customer is not always right. Customers often act like monkeys. But you've got to treat them well. We say the customer is King, and we also expect them to be loyal to us. Were kings loyal to there subjects, or the other way round?"		Prahlad Kakkar Ad Film Maker "You need to be flexible. The system will bend you, if you are not agile. The greatest ads happen by accident, not deliberation. You'll find great ads in dustbins of ad agencies. When people have nothing to lose, they become creative."