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COVER STORY Building The CEO Brand Taking a cue from American companies, India Inc. is fast realising that its most valuable brand sits not on shop shelves, but in the corner room. By Seema Shukla
That a company's most powerful brand may, in fact, be its CEO has been known to consummate marketers abroad for a long time now. Consider Bill Gates. His studied nerdy image, accentuated by unkempt hair and ordinary oval spectacles, has been perpetuated in meetings after meetings with media, analysts, shareholders, and customers. The message: our top-most man is a software whiz himself, and when you buy any of our products, it has his personal stamp. The pr machine at the world's most valuable company, General Electric (GE), works tirelessly to let out carefully chosen bits of information to build CEO Jack Welch's aura. How Welch, while pulling through the now unsuccessful Honeywell deal, works virtually through a weekend, checks in for a scratched cornea, but still makes it to the first game of the World Series baseball at New York's Yankee stadium. GE's point: our organisation, including the head honcho, delivers, but, hey, we also know how to have fun. Any surprise then that GE is the world's most admired company? Indian CEOs, in contrast, have gotten away with staying in the nooks and crannies of their corporation's image. After all, it isn't Indian to put an individual ahead of his family, be it the social or corporate kind. But a bigger reason was that Indian CEOs didn't need to. Markets were captive, most big corporations were family-owned and managed, and in a ''to be'' culture like India's (versus ''to do'' of the American's), the family surname was a big enough passport to the corridors of power. Sure, there have been legendary CEO brands such as G.D. Birla and J.R.D. Tata. But they were never consciously cultivated to reap measurable benefits such as growth in sales, profits, or market capitalisation. But opening up of the economy and globalisation have turned that equation on its head. Suddenly, the CEO doesn't just have to be an effective leader, a visionary, and a change agent. But he has to be, dig this, interesting; he must have played golf (if not yet baseball), must know how to crack impromptu jokes at meetings and parties, must have a ''story'' he can call his own, and if there's a maverick streak to him, all the better. In other words, he must be a brand. A brand that can ''connect'' with and be sold-unlike most product brands-across the corporate universe: customers, suppliers, shareholders, partners, policy-makers, social pressure groups, and just about anybody who remotely affects the fortunes of the corporation. ''There is no room for blandness in a CEO brand,'' declares John Williamson, Director and Partner, Wolff Olins, Omnicom Group's major brand consultancy based in London. Times Are A'Changing
Doubt Williamson or the effectiveness of a CEO as a brand? Take a look at this: according to a study done in the US by Burson-Marsteller with 1,400 key corporate executives and their critical audiences, the CEO's reputation represents 45 per cent of a company's reputation; 95 per cent of analysts buy a stock based on the CEO's reputation; 94 per cent of analysts would recommend a company's stock based on the CEO's reputation, 81 per cent of the respondents said they would believe a company under pressure based on the CEO's reputation, and 80 per cent would recommend a company as a good place to work for based on the CEO's reputation. In India's modern corporate history (post late-eighties), the most powerful CEO brand to have been built has to be N.R. Narayana Murthy's. Maybe purely by default, but that's a larger-than-life image that neither the company nor Narayana Murthy himself has done anything to subtract from. If anything, Infosys' frenetic growth has only helped cement the CEO brand. For instance, it is never allowed to be forgotten that Infosys was founded with a meagre $1,000 scraped from Narayana Murthy's own meagre savings and his wife's jewellery. Or that the man himself owns just 7 per cent of the company, or even that he only flies economy class, stays in budget hotels, lives in a definitely middle-class neighbourhood in Bangalore, and runs the household on a budget that could be any other man's. The fact that Narayana Murthy is willing to share his wealth has made Infosys India's best company to work for (See BT Anniversary Issue, January 21, 2001), with 2,60,000 applications pouring in last year; transparency and integrity have made investors buy Infosys stocks at a premium, making it India's second-largest wealth creator. And customers have queued up to place orders with Infosys because they know that only the best talent works for Infosys. In fact, Narayana Murthy's brand has become so powerful that he is routinely invited by the government and business chambers to brainstorm policy issues, where other equally competent CEOs (like Azim Premji, richer than Narayana Murthy) have been passed over. Indeed, what is happening is that organisations and agencies around him are trying to heighten their own credibility through association with Brand Narayana Murthy. ''(He) has become an icon,'' quips Srini Rajam, Chairman, Ittiam. The Infosys founder-CEO may be corporate India's most powerful icon, but he's hardly its only one. Ratan Tata, for example, continues to personify the core values of integrity, professionalism, and altruism that the Tata family name and corporate brand mean to millions of Indians. Rahul Bajaj of Bajaj Auto has come to symbolise post-liberalisation India's voice for a ''level-playing'' field and the indigenous industry's fight for global competitiveness. His only peer, in a slightly different sense, though, is Y.C. Deveshwar of ITC. His famously fierce battles with majority-owner bat Plc have made him a poster boy among professionals who prize the independence of native management. Dhirubhai Ambani easily epitomises the triumph of the humble entrepreneur and the success of free economy, while liquor major UB could not have asked for a better brand ambassador than its CEO Vijay Mallya, who, like the company's flagship brand, Kingfisher, is perceived as the ''king of good times''. It is easy to see how the absence of any of these Brand CEOs would affect the concerned companies.
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The fact
that virgin Atlantic had just flown in its first London-New Delhi flight
became inconsequential. What mattered was that the ruggedly handsome CEO
was standing on the tarmac in bhangra togs in Virgin colours (red and
lilac) doing a Punjabi jig for the Indian media. For the 36 hours that he
was in India last year, Richard Branson, in his trademark ''audacious''
style, rode an elephant, drove an auto rickshaw, wore designer churidhar
kurta, and even judged a beauty pageant. The brand-building exercise was
complete with a cherry-red Ambassador called ''Noddy'' for him to travel
in, and a mock hangar-including a runway-built for his inaugural party.
Thus, in less than three days CEO Branson did to Virgin what three years
of advertising, direct mailers, or marketing promotions perhaps could not
have done.
