Lulu Raghavan, Managing Director, Landor & Fitch, On Extraordinary Brand Transformation (An Inside Out Journey)
BRANDS AND DESIGN HAVE AN INCREDIBLE VALUE IF THEY ARE UTILISED WELL IN AN ORGANISATION. THE PROBLEM IS THAT A LOT OF US THINK OF A BRAND AS A LOGO AND SO THE IMPACT OF BRAND IS LIMITED. TODAY I AM GOING TO TALK ABOUT THE POWER OF BRAND TO TRANSFORM AN ORGANISATION AND INDIVIDUALS.
Brand transformation in an inside-out journey. I will start with my own journey and then we will talk about the 5 lessons that one can learn from brands that have transformed themselves and then I have 10 top start-ups for building their own personal brands.
I was born in Madurai in a pretty conservative Tamilian Brahmin family and then I got the nickname Lulu, my mother actually names me Sulakshana, my father hated the name and named me Lulu. I share this you because it is a bit of an existential crisis, I worked abroad for many years and there was never a problem with the name Lulu but when I came back to India and introduced myself as Lulu Raghavan I met with many strange eyes. So, it has been really interesting over the years to navigate that conversation.
My early years were spent in Bangalore in 2 schools, Baldwin Girls’ School and Valley School. From Valley School, I learnt that education never stops, Jiddu Krishnamurti who started the school was a huge believer in the power of education and that one constantly learns and my life-long love for learning was seeded in Valley School.
Then I moved to Mumbai, to Queen Mary school and then to Cathedral in the 11th and 12th. After that I got a scholarship to go to a school called Davidson, one of the top Liberal Arts colleges in the US where I spent 4 years studying Economics and Math. I actually spent a semester in Tours, France so, I am fluent in French and later on learnt Spanish. These qualities I am sharing with you because they shaped my experiences and the skill set I have today.
After Davidson I came back to India and my mum introduced me to a gentleman called Shmit Roy who was at Lintas those days and he asked me, ‘Lulu do you want to be a small fish in a big pond? Or a big fish in a small pond?’ I was chasing dreams of being an investment banker, management consultant and he felt that those were rat races and not for me. So, he introduced me to Ogilvy, he introduced me to R Shridhar, and I fell in love with brands and Ogilvy brand consulting which was my first job.
Shridhar then gave me a second piece of transformative advice. He was a huge fan of David Ogilvy, he believed that one can be successful in the agency business but if I was interested in brand consulting, I needed to get an MBA. So, I got my MBA from SP Jain Institute and Management and Research. Coming out of SP Jain, 21 years ago, I started my job. I am still at my first job or 2nd job rather. I went to San Francisco and started Landor Brand consultancy. Spent four years there, my husband was working for dotcom, it crashed, he went to business school and then we went to New York. I was able to move Landor to New York where I spent a year and then moved on to London.
I was lucky in London because that is where Mr Naresh Goyal hired Landor to rebrand Jet Airways. It was my first big Indian client programme, and I learnt a lot from seeing how entrepreneurs thought about the business and how they value brands. A year later my husband and I had the opportunity to come back to Mumbai and I was given charge to set up operations for Landor here. So, that was Landor Mumbai in 2007.
Initially we were five girls, we did a lot of work for the Taj group, Hindustan Construction Company… Mr RK Krishnakumar at the Taj used to call us the Ladies of Landor. We were famous, he actually asked me if I hired only women on the team. I grew the Landor team to 25 people and then last year we had an integration with Fitch. Some of you may be familiar with the retail-design company Fitch.
I am lucky to be in a company with two iconic founders, Walter Landor who famously invented branding said that ‘Products are manufactured in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.’ And Rodney Fitch who was a great pioneer of retail design felt that design is a differentiator and he wanted to create extra-ordinary designs for the masses.
Our core is Brand Transformation. In the last 21 years of my career, everything that I have done is about brand transformation and for us that involves aligning the brand strategy with a business strategy, thinking about how the brand comes to life in all the elements – how it thinks, looks, feels. The experience of the brand, how it can be used to transform your culture and engage your employees, how rigorously you manage your brand and how you keep an eye on brand performance to impact the business.
Today we have a team of over 100 and all of us dedicated to brand transformation.
When I look back to last 21 years, I am proud to have evangelized brands. I did a show with Bloomberg UTV on how brands are beyond logo and the show was actually called Beyond logo. I was at the Cannes Lion, but when I came back, I really used all my learning to help the team understand what world-class designing and branding are about. The work that we did for the Taj is actually a Harvard Business school case study, and there are several case studies on the work that we have done. One of the complaints we have heard from the IIMs and other business schools is that there aren’t enough brand case studies. So, my team has contributed to that as well. And, like I pointed out earlier, the women I am super proud about, if all of these folks who have gone to heading agencies, to be CMOs, on the client side, all of whom I have spent a lot of time mentoring. I am also giving back by writing a news-letter every Sunday on personal growth and development, it is called Ideas To Play With and you can see it on my website. That is my background!
We strongly believe that brands matter more than ever; if you look at the stock market and how companies are valued, more than 30% of the enterprise value is represented by brands. Michael Eisner was one of the first CEOs who recognised the power of brands. He said, “The Disney brand is our most valuable asset. It is the sum total of our 75 years in business, of our reputation, of everything that we stand for.”
BrandZ is a database that tracks the index of strong brands vs the S&P index and the MSCI World index. You can see how investing in brands delivers superior shareholder return. What is interesting is what happens to brands in the downturn, like during the Lehman crisis in 2008, or at the start of the Covid crisis. You see how the market as well as index of strong brands have dipped but when things start to come back, the strong brand’s portfolio has fallen less but also recovered much faster. So, brand is really reputation you can count on.
When we say brand, it is an intersection of strategy, experience design and culture. A lot of people then say that okay what does brand mean if it is not a logo? You might have heard Jeff Bezos who said, ‘Your brand is what people say when you are not in the room.” So, after this session what you say about this session or me really defines brand Landor and Fitch or brand Lulu in your mind.
I also wanted to have a parallel track to personal branding because this of huge interest to a lot of folks. When I talk about corporate brands and building corporate brands many folks ask me how does this apply to personal brands? Think about personal brand as how you would like to be remembered as an individual. What is the legacy that you would like to leave behind? What is the ideal way of thinking about personal branding?
Use brands to transform your culture first – Mahindra is a great example. The business has made great strides, but the brand was actually perceived fuddy-duddy, and this stained on Mahindra. He had bought SsangYong, invested in Reva the electric car, won Satyam. The company was making great strides, but the brand was seen as quite agricultural, as not very progressive, or dynamic. So, they defined the purpose of organisation as Rise.
Mahindra being an organisation that empowers all stakeholders to get ahead, they defined Rise as their reason to be, their philosophy and course of action, they have been able to stretch their arms to perfection. They said Rise is who we are and together rise is what we do. This is not just a poster that is put up in the cafeteria or offices of the Mahindra group, they are super committed to the pillars of Rise – accepting no limits, alternative thinking and driving positive change.
All of these changes are driven into the way the business heads think of the business and even how employees are actually evaluating. During the Covid times this purpose of the organisation was so firmly embedded, that employees rose to the occasion; you might have read about how the factories in Nashik they repurposed it to make a low-cost ventilator.
Internally, they have Rise awards that rewards employees who exhibit on brand behaviours. So, brand transformation starts with finding a powerful purpose that motivates the organisation and employees.
As it relates to personal branding, I love to say that we have to go in before we go out. A lot of people tend to think of personal branding as social media and shouting out from the roof top, but it is about figuring your special gift, your true talent that you can pour into your work and share with the world.
Reimagine your entire brand experience – think about the stages of the journey, the touch points, you have so many ways in which an organisation can build its brand other that advertising. Yes, it is communication, but it is also the call centre the retail showroom, the social media, it is the way your employees interact with the customers, all the touch points create an impression of what the brand stands for. We have a tool called the Experience map that helps you think through how the brand will be expressed in all of the touch pints. How it looks, how it feels, how it talks, how it is done and how to dream.
For example, Etihad, the national carrier of Abu Dhabi looked so dowdy. Abu Dhabi meanwhile had taken on this reputation of becoming a modern city, they had invested in visionary architectures, a city of unprecedented luxury, Etihad was supposed to be an ambassador in the air, and it did not embody Etihad at all. When we worked with Etihad it was to link Etihad with the stature and perception that Abu Dhabi had gained globally. So, the whole idea was to make this airline remarkable. The purpose was to transform what each of us believe travel could be.
From a personal branding perspective, a lot of people say how can I express myself through different touch points? Think of brand and branding as story and signals. If you go in to find your story, where will you go out? Jot down all the business touch points, think about your business card, your website, your LinkedIn profile, published articles. Even if you don’t do any of those elements, how you appear, speak, handwriting, body language, photographs, how you shake your hand, word of mouth, all of these signals back to your story. So, if you want to intentionally build your personal brand, you need to align your story with the signals that you are sharing with the world.
Communicate your extraordinariness – some folks just sit in the corner and hope the world will discover them, but they are not going to. You have to communicate, of course in advertising and marketing we say communicate, communicate, communicate and I think in the last few years all organisations have found their voice. We need to do it internally first, externally, and then continuously repeat. For example, Wipro started identifying its core purpose which was the idea of amplifying client’s business success through the power of connected insights. The story that Wipro wanted to communicate or stand for was then manifested in the visual identity of the brand, the connected dots, to serve the clients better. And they launched the brand internally to make sure that all the employees understand the spirit of Wipro and the promise of connected insights before they actually took it out in the market. And then they had a special launch to their top 300 special customers in the US where they introduced the why before the brand. A lot of times companies undergo brand transformation, and nothing changes except the logo and customers don’t understand the why. Wipro actually did a 2-day seminar, talked to the customers to take them through the why of change and how else their organisation was changing and how they were committed to the path ahead.
When it comes to personal branding, you too need to have a powerful itch. Can you condense everything that is great about your skills, credibility, the values that you stand for? So, when we talk about interviews, the interviewer asks, ‘Tell me about yourself’. Are you going to tell the history, or you have a powerful 10-word pitch? Super committed to create commercial impact, etc. this is something you can work upon and then those of you who wish to manifest that, you can think of different channels, your own website, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, how do you really make sure that you appear and come to life in a way that is consistent to your elevator pitch. The search bar in Google is equally important as well because when someone types in, what is it that they actually get? That gives them an impression who you are, today people will google search you even before meeting you.
When you do all of this, your transform brand will grow.
So, if I were to summarise the key success factors of extraordinary brand transformation,
- there will be a lot of stakeholders, you have to make an inclusive but ultimately one person has to make the call. This is really important otherwise you can go around in circles.
- Respect tradition, emotion and experience but make a powerful case for change based on logic and magic.
- Create brand guidelines that inspire not create fear psychosis. It is about customer experience more than anything else.
- Launch the brand internally before you do externally because your people are your most powerful brand ambassadors.
- Ensure a brand change goes much deeper than a logo change.
- Use the brand as a flag bearer of your business transformation.
- Ensure the brand promise can be delivered at every touch point.
- Execution and persistence are necessary after a strategy has been decided.
Remember, building a brand is like raising a child. You are viewing it as long-term perspective; you don’t know how it is going to turn out, but you have to give it a go. You have to enjoy the journey; it is the journey that matters not the destination.
I strongly believe that you cannot have a personal brand if you don’t take care of sleeping better, eating better, moving better and thinking better. A fantastic book by Greg Well called Ripple Effect talks about the foundational elements of success and this is certainly one of them.
Personal branding also talks about how inspired you are about the world; it is about garbage in and garbage out. You never know which dots are going to connect to get the breakthrough idea that your business needs.
A lot of time we focus on your minds, but we forget our soul and spirit and to build a holistic personal brand it is important to feel both your soul and spirit. It could be culture, religion, or meditation, don’t neglect your soul and spirit in pursuit of excellence.
We have the elevator pitch, one of the exercises you can do before the elevator pitch is to write a visionary of yourself, it is a nice way to think about your legacy that you want to leave behind, it will help you define, intent a vision and dream for yourself at work.
A lot of times we think that we have to follow somebody else’s footsteps, but it is really important to develop and nurture your own persona. We also forget that we have a voice. We do have one and it is important to use it. if you are invisible, nobody is going to know to exist.
Growth also comes out from stepping out of your comfort zone. When it comes to leadership, don’t pander to a stereotype of a boss or a manager, it is important to lead with a natural style. And, at the end of the day, if you don’t promote yourself, nobody else will and if you dream big and you want those opportunities out there in the world, you have to promote yourself in a way to adding values to others not in a way to just about calling attention to yourself.
At some stage when you have established yourself, it is not about yourself anymore, it is about shining the light on others and promoting, and mentoring others and that is one of the best ways to build your own personal brand. And it is super important to be yourself because everybody else is already taken.
