Santosh Desai on Understanding Brands
When somebody says ‘this is a very strong brand’, what are they really talking about?
Santosh Desai is one of the most authoritative voices on all matters about brands. He spoke to me on 7 December 2020 in a live chat.
Santosh Desai
Managing Director & CEO, Future Brands Ltd
Santosh Desai, is an author, columnist and media critic. His first book on contemporary India, Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India, is a collection of essays that traces the evolution of middle class India over the last two decades. In his professional life, Santosh heads a brand and consumer consultancy company and has previously headed an advertising agency. Santosh’s principal area of interest lies in examining the evolving nature of consumer culture in India. He has been writing a weekly column in the Times of India for over 14 years.
A brand is a pattern of expectations. It is something we come to expect of somebody and it is a pattern because over a period of time, people behave in a certain way. They speak in a certain way and we come to have a set of expectations about them. That’s what a brand does.
The other way of saying this is, perhaps a little more elevated way of saying this it that brands are systems that provide meaning that are not inherent in an object, in a service, in an organization. They add a layer of meaning over and above what the organization or the individual or the product might be delivering.
“A brand is a pattern of expectations.”
You take carbonated water and you add a layer of meaning and it becomes Coco-Cola or you add a different layer of meaning and it becomes Pepsi.
Strong brands are the ones that create the most valuable meaning in people’s lives. They are the ones that we feel a strong affinity for, that build relationships where there comes to be a strong belief in them and that can transcend individual products.
In the case of organizations, it doesn’t have to do with products. It’s a belief in the fact that an organization will behave in a certain way and over a period of time you come to trust and believe that. So, I think strong brands create valuable meaning, if I was to still stay within a non- technical kind of definition of brands.
When you look at how organizations have actually behaved during this pandemic time, when a number of organizations have had to break the contract with their employees, they’ve had to lay off employees and all that – when you think about it, does it mean that the brand values that the organization stood for – the trust and all that, is now gone forever and it’s a new organization or is it that in this context we expect that this is going to happen – so it doesn’t shake the brand.
There is a degree of latitude that organizations do enjoy because everyone enjoys the fact that this is something that was difficult to foresee, difficult to manage. In some sectors you have months without any sales, it is easier to understand that the organization would struggle. The manner in which the organization would act, is also a sign of the kind of brand that you really are. The humanity with which organizations engage with the employees at a time like this, or how concerned are they about actually the welfare of employees and not only about themselves matter.
The bigger question comes when organizations decide to scale down headcount. The internal language to reduce the headcount is often clinical and transactional. You have a problem in Latin America which means people loose jobs in Asia and not because of anything you did wrong but simply because you have to shed so many jobs and you have to cut costs – which is purely a transactional kind of move. That’s where the professed brand and what the brand says to the outside world and all the wonderful things that it apparently stands for gets hollowed out. Its action contradicts its claims.
Do lofty statements that claim, the organization wants to “change the world”, inspire people or it’s just another thing that’s been said? How do you distinguish between that?
There’s a very real danger when brands set out with these very lofty ways of describing themselves of changing the world and you know where your interventions are not, you are making small things – toothbrushes and the like. It is a problem when every brand makes these lofty statements because it’s very difficult to live up to them and also the first time you do it, there is a curiosity, there is interest. Eventually marketing is very good at debasing language. Over a period of time all superlatives lose meaning. So, lofty claims lose meaning because you use them so often.
Brands are doing this because they recognise that the stakeholders, consumers, and employees want business to become more responsible. They are evaluating business on many more dimensions than they did earlier. So, at a certain level, you’re reading a writing on the wall, that you need to come through as being more caring, compassionate, more socially kind of oriented. The problem is that it is a difficult change to me because you work in a financial eco system which does not necessarily recognise that.
“There is an inherent tension between having to meet investors and shareholders expectations and having to meet consumer and employee expectations.”
There is an inherent tension between having to meet investors and shareholders expectations and having to meet consumer and employee expectations. So, therefore it’s easy to make these lofty claims, but structurally you’re not equipped to live up to them and that is a tension. In most cases, it ends up becoming one more marketing slogan and it becomes particularly ironic because you’re playing with people’s feelings.
Is the product brand different from the employer brand? Can an average product brand have a strong employer brand? Or does one rub off into the other?
It is absolutely possible to have that distinction. You behave in a certain way as a product and you behave in a certain way as an employer. The brand is a consequence of your behaviour. You have historically been making an average product and you’re stuck with that, but you have a management that values its employees in ways and is able to be a progressive employer. It is possible for you to be a mediocre brand and a terrific employer brand. It is more common to be a very highly valued consumer brand but a terrible place to work. There is no inherent reason to believe why the two must be in sync. Although the great brands and great organizations do strive. If there is a desire to do really well in one sphere, it can often translate into a desire to do equally well in another. While there is no inherent reason why it need be the case, there are instances where you will find that you’ll have both strong brands - both employer brands as well as consumer brands.
You have a leadership brand which is effectively the way the leaders or the leadership team, not just the CEO, but the senior leaders of the organization – the way they come across to the external world and the internal world. Then there is the talent brand which is – how the average employees feel about – is my workplace one which attracts the top talent? Or is it another place of mediocrity? So, what they really believe. A lot of which gets reflected in – let’s say Glassdoor kind of place and then you also have the third element which is the culture of the place – that, this is how we do things. Do they all join up and become subsets of the overall thing called the brand or are they facing different – the external brand and the internal brand. Where do you see the overlap? Or is there an overlap at all?
In an ideal case, all the brands would be aligned. An ideal situation when things are working well, when there is internal clarity, when there’s a sense of purpose that is real – which is actually acted upon by the leadership brand, is experienced by the talent brand reflects in small actions in everyday life within the organization and therefore is reflected in the ethos of the organization, in the culture brand and all of it in a sense is aligned to the consumer promise and the meaning that you provide to the consumer. They may not be articulated in the same way because all of them have different points of emphasis, but they all would be aligned and they all would be coherent. However, that is not necessarily the case. So, the consumer brand, because it is external facing is often the one that can be the most far apart. The other brands tend to be related because if the leadership is a very autocratic relationship, then you’ll find the culture of the organization has to be willy-nilly of a certain kind. Has to tow the line, has to be fearful, has to live. There is a certain pattern that gets created and the talent will typically be the kind of thing that is - salute the flag in a meeting and after two drinks will mutter kind of things and anonymously put a horrible review on Glassdoor. But there, you tend to find the big difference between the internal brand and the external brand, but the elements of the internal brand can also point in different directions or tend to be bunched up closer together.
When you have a very strong brand, you can actually charge a premium. Ironically, a number of companies, when they say that “because we are a strong employer brand, we value add dramatically to you, it’s a great culture”, they actually land up paying the people less. A number of companies that I know of will say “this is the premium that we are going to extract from you by paying you less because we are a great place to work”. In one place you pay more and one place you earn less?
The same logic, there the consumer is willing to pay more, here the employer is willing to pay more. While it may seem that you are paying the other way round, actually the price is being paid by the employee here to be a part of this organization and that’s a view that companies with strong cultures do have quite often and there is some merit to that because there is value that they add. The danger of course is the fact that in any such exercise both at the consumer and employer front – when you extract value in two visible a way – for instance search pricing – why is it the consumers will always resent search pricing – because in a cold-blooded sense it’s the way the market works. There’s a spike in demand, surely the price can go up. But on the other hand, it becomes a grudge – you grudge the fact that you have to pay. So, you have to decide for yourself whether that inherent sense of resentment that you will invite along with your extraction of a premium, whether that is worth it your while or not. That’s a call you need to take as an employer brand.
As a founder of a start-up, let’s assume you’re growing rapidly and everybody has great expectations – is it a smarter idea to actually extract that search pricing to take that same analogy, from the point of view of the employees. Is it a smart idea to do that or it’s a bad move because it’ll come back to bite you?
There is a hidden cost also to creating a great culture. While if may not be apparent, there is a certain amount of investment that needs to be made in building that great culture. There are times when you overlook poor performance because you understand that somebody’s going through a bad patch. So, when companies are more human, it can be more expensive for them. It’s not necessary, it is also sort of more inclusive culture. More progressive culture is necessarily more efficient in a purely financial sense. So, I would not dismiss the fact that there would be occasions on which having that kind of a mindset to say that ‘look we were providing a great culture, that means you will have to do with a little less in terms of the monetary part of your reward, but it’s up to you. As long as we are able to deliver the other stuff so that you are happier, we are fine’. So, I would not rule out that possibility. But having said that, particularly in today’s age, it’s always a risky thing when you try and extract too much because the problem is, the context of the employer-employee relationship is such that it’s asymmetrical in terms of power. Therefore for you to have a really good sense of the other side and to understand how the employee really feels is often a real problem and so it is possible to impose a tax so to speak which is how it is experienced. On the other side it will come and bite you in the back at some stage or the other as you said. So, I would say do it but do it carefully. I’m not saying don’t do it at all, but it has a price.
And the reason why this becomes an interesting conundrum to think about is that – I was reading Colin Mayer’s book Prosperity. It talks about some research which says 85% of the firm’s value today comes from intangible factors such as brands, talents, the intellectual property, patents, etc. design, supply chain. It’s really like when we go and buy a mobile phone, there is a certain premium you pay for the design, for the safety feature, security, how it looks and what possessing that brand does to you as a person. So, when you think about the whole process, is it time to put less emphasis on the tangible factors like financial metrics. You just said that taking a financial view, you’d probably say it makes sense that we don’t need to invest all that much, but in today’s day and age very very hyper connected employee – would that be something that you would advise?
Absolutely. I would go back a step or two to say that the problem with the whole employer-employee dynamic is the fact that the employers talk in the language of relationships but act in the language of transactions. So, fundamentally that’s the dichotomy and unless the mental model of the employee and what the employee represents itself changes and it is changing in some organizations. But unless it changes in a more mainstream sense, this tension is always going to arise. Therefore, how do you value intangible things on both sides? How do you create value for that? Firstly, by having those intangible things, right. The important thing is that only when you value the fact, when you believe that the intangible stuff is important that you invest in it, that you spend time thinking about it. So, issues like mental health or issues like what are the other parts of the employee’s life can employers think about and add value to.? How do you allow, encourage and facilitate the larger growth, overall growth of employees as people? Unless you recognize that this is important, your ability to invest in it or spend time on it or think it merits resources of any kind will be low. If you do these things, then it is fair to expect that it will be valued on the other side. Going and saying that I work in so and so company can be a sense of pride for a lot of people and that is intangible value just as employers providing avenues for employees to grow in their personal sense can be a source of very good reason for employees to feel passionate and committed to that organization. So the intangible, the value comes in once you recognize that there is value there. Otherwise if you don’t recognize the value at all then it’s a non-start.
Today, a sense of identity that people have actually comes in from the place of work and now we’ve all moved to working from home. All those things that also added to the brand, the kind of fancy office, the perks of the office, large cubicle – all of that has disappeared. Do you think the concept of employer brand has got to be recalibrated on different measures and how would that play out going forward:
Brands create feelings through all experiences. When you go to a retail store it is an experience. All of that becomes a way that you decode the brand. Without going to an Apple store, Apple would probably not have the kind of aura it has around it. There is a certain theatre that is involved in everything. A doctor’s office is theatrical in a sense that there’ll be certificates, there is a sense of authority that make us believe that there’s somebody who knows what they are doing. Unless there is some sign of authority, it’ll be difficult. If it had a wooden bench and you are made to sit out, you would not let that person anywhere near your teeth.
So, it’s undoubtedly true that when you’re sitting at home in your shorts, the sense of being part of a large organization and whatever intangible rewards that you were getting out of it does get diminished. I think what it means is that organizations have to work harder to deliver, from a fundamental sense, a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, a sense of being attached to something larger but also in terms of intangible rewards. How do you feel good about working from where you are?
So many intangible ways that you get positive feedback, that you get reinforcement when you go into your place of work. It also works the other way round. You also get, if not done well, negative reinforcement in your place of work. Recognizing this, so the task becomes all the more difficult when you don’t have physical manifestations of the brand. Virtual branding is much more of a difficult task, you don’t have a touch and feel experience, you don’t have human experience – then to communicate ideas; we all communicate ideas through tangible things.
The idea of the brand does not get communicated without tangible reward. On zoom or on a platform like this, it is possible to create a sense of intimacy. It is possible to create rewards of an intangible kind as long as you think about that and actually invest in it.
When it comes to branding, is there a distinction in a way B2B brands work or the way B2C brands work because many people see a lot more of B2C is more tangible numbers, it’s much more in your face and is that an inherent advantage B2C brands have over the business to business kind of setting, far more industrial in its outlook?
It’s true that it’s easier for a B2C brand because it’s more of a one to many kind of relationship, it’s very scattered because of the fact that you have the means of articulating the brand which are kind of more performative in the sense that you’ve advertising, you have a retail store – it becomes possible to see what the brand is about and to grasp it much more easily. So, it is undoubtedly easier for a B2C brand. But fundamentally, the idea of a brand is sector agnostic.
In fact, idea of brands arguably has nothing to do with business also. People, organizations, films are brands as we see, sports people are brands. The brand is a conceptual idea. So, the B2B brand is much a brand but it gets communicated in others. It gets communicated through people more than it does through things like advertising. It gets communicated through product, through interaction service.
“Brand gets communicated much more through culture.”
Brand gets communicated much more through culture. Organization culture becomes much more customer facing in many ways than it is in the case of a B2C brand. So, organization culture in many ways is a more important marketing force in a B2B scenario than it is in a B2C scenario, because how you come through to and deal with your customers has a lot to do with the way that the organization is hard wired and therefore to that extent it’s interesting. While it is easier to talk about and think about a brand in a B2C context, the B2B actually, the gap between the employer brand and the customer brand tends to be lower and tends to be greater relationship between the two.
When you think about the concept of brand, does it really get shaped by the leader’s opinions, the kind of marketing spends or does it in any way get shaped by having a influencer and ambassador. Is there a role that influencers play?
There’s a role that all elements play. The biggest role is played by consumers and customers. A brand is what they make of it. You may try your damn best to be A or B or C, but eventually the only thing real is how you are seen by others. The brand is a residual impression, it’s the meaning that you provide. You may have tried to do whatever, but what I receive out of it is the only thing that matters at the end. So, the strongest determent if the brand is not the leadership, is nobody else, it’s the consumer and the relationship that is built with the consumer or the customer as the case may be.
I would say that that’s the most strong driver of the brand. But everyone, all other elements play a role. Does leadership play a role, it does because – there are so many brands that are led by charismatic individuals. If the brands value are actually represented by the leadership very strongly, then the leader becomes a very powerful source. If it is not represented that strongly by the leader, again in a lot of organizations, the leader is not known in a branded sense. He may be leading the organization, but he is not a brand figure, it can potentially be a leader, it can be influencers.
We have had a democratisation that has taken place through the coming of a digital medium. The whole idea as to who owns the brand and who speaks for the brand has moved from either being the leadership or being paid for very celebrity ambassadors who are all kind of hired guns. Two, being anybody who is the user of the brand.
Influencers are semi-professional consumers. They are people who have consumed things and learnt how to consume things, developed a fluency in consumption. Influencers understand what the users or consumers want as well as how the product works or how the brand works for them and they are kind of interpreters of that relationship.
“Influencers understand what the users or consumers want as well as how the product works or how the brand works for them and they are kind of interpreters of that relationship. ”
If you have a cooking influencer who tells you how to do things with various products and how to do interesting recipes, you have a fashion blogger who is able to tell people how to figure out what is your look and therefore what suits you, your style. So, this is a like-to-like, peer-to peer kind of a education that is taking place, advertising that is taking place. So, what you have is a completely new layer of a democratic and a democratized set of spokespeople for the brand. Therefore, they play a very powerful role. Paid-for influencers that brands harness are useful if done right but at a fundamental level there is a tension between paying for influencers and what made them influencers is the fact that they were offering unbiased honest opinions and when they get paid for, unless they do it well there can be a fundamental contradiction.
When the employees write something on Glassdoor, does the same logic apply?
The logic of Glassdoor is the fact that, you start by saying you bull-shit all the time because you know you’re supposed to. So the logic of Glassdoor is that it was not a Glassdoor, it was a steal door. It was all bottled up inside. This is a Glassdoor, which means you can see inside and we are giving you the opportunity to tell us things that other people are not supposed to see. The fundamental logic of Glassdoor is to provide employees with an outlet that their conventional channel does not allow. The incentive for employees to come out and say good things simply because they are paid for it is a little different in this case. So, if anything the incentive is for them to come out and say things they are not allowed to say because that is what the medium allows.
So, in some sense a clever leader would allow them to articulate all the things that bother them so that if they can address it and when that happens, they are actually the ones they are stating something, it’s a lot more authentic?
I think that’s true. It’s very important for employees today to let go of this whole, very contrived kind of an internal narrative that is built, employees are supposed to parrot that, that is policed in a variety of ways. Organizations may not use words like parroting and policing, they may use gentler kind of words, alignment with values etc. There are many more nicer ways of saying the same thing. The truth is (Corporate truth) – that’s a evolved kind of a discipline.
“Sincerity is the consonance between what you say and what you do, authenticity is the inadvertent assertion of your most fundamental impulse.”
Two things – there’s an essayist called Lionel Trilling who distinguishes between sincerity and authenticity and he says sincerity is the consonance between what you say and what you do, authenticity is the inadvertent assertion of your most fundamental impulse. And what he says – the external brand is the consonance between what I say and what I do. But the internal brand is about the fact that what if your deepest impulse you can’t help but act in that way – that is what culture is about.
When your deepest impulse is what is expressed in your behaviour and if that is open to listening to employees, that has a way of communicating itself. The idea of authenticity is about the fact that – you wake somebody up – it’s that old Birbal’s story of saying that this person who’s sworn in some 40 languages and you can’t figure out what is the mother tongue. Birbal is tasked with figuring it out and in the middle of the night he takes this freezing pale of water and appends it on this guy as he’s sleeping and he wakes up and says…….. whatever in Gujarati, if I remember right, the story goes.
Your deepest impulse when woken up from a slumber is who you are.– what you do when somebody is not looking or whatever. That is a real sign of the employer’s impulse and real kind of a value in a sense.
Then in which case my question would be that when you hire people who are very different does that dilute the brand? So, in that sense is diversity in your people composition, the kind of people that you’re hiring, does that dilute the brand because it’s far more stronger if everybody looks the same, feels the same. So, inherently is something changing about that?
Authenticity is not the same as uniformity. Authenticity is simply if anything to recognize the fact that every human being is different however similar they may sound to you in a meeting and however similar you make them. Fundamentally they are all driven by different motivations and it is in recognizing that and building a culture that not only accommodates those differences but actually is able to celebrate them and harness them.
Increasingly in today’s world where you’re dealing with a much more complex kind of a reality, fluid reality, if you are programmed in a very limited, on single note, then your ability to deal with the kind of changes that you are seeing, to keep pace, to anticipate and morph and mold yourself is extremely low because you take on a rigidity of form. That is the idea of the military, that is the classic idea of uniformity and uniforms, the idea that everything moves in a defined way, you have control. Today what you’re seeking is pretty much the opposite of that. Your loose, fluid formations are agile and creative is what you’re looking for.
Switching to the individual, there are a couple of questions that have come up which are really around the fact that how would youexplain personal brand and is it more important for freelancers to have a strong personal brand because as long as people are employed by an organization willy-nilly, the organization’s business card in some way shapes your brand, when they are by themselves the importance of the personal brand is what the market looks at. Is that a valid way to understand it?
Yes, in a sense if I look at it from the purpose of usefulness – when does an idea of the personal brand become useful or material or relevant. Then it’s certainly true that when you’re being a personal brand, not as a material impact on whether you’re able to attract a clientele, or looked up to or valued by people, surely that difference exists. Conceptually there’s no difference.
In an organization all of us are in a sense personal brand. Some of us are better defined than others, the truth is every individual has a pattern of behaviour, as a routine of a certain kind, inescapable. There is nobody who has no set pattern of behaviour and that is understood by people. When dad comes home, in a certain posture you know it’s time to cut low at the back side and not be seen for the next two hours. At the most simple level, everybody has a sense and they know how to read the signs and patterns of behaviour.
Like individuals, we have different people with different constituencies of behaviour, we have different patterns. The same thing holds for in the context of freelancers. There what you’re trying to do is harness and focus because of a certain use you want the brand to be put to, because there is a certain value that the brand must attract and command. There is a more conscious acknowledgement of the personal brand. In your real life with your family, you don’t care about your personal brand, it has no material value. But in a business context, it has material value and therefore you think about it, you craft it, you pay attention to it. So, to that extent, yes.
So, what are some of the things that you as a branding guru can offer to people to build their personal brand and what are some ways they can start? What are a couple of things they can do and how can they do this? Another question that has come up is when people often advise you on say LinkedIn – only post things pertaining to work, on Facebook post things pertaining to this, on Instagram you do…. So, is that something which is desirable, doable, that you add different things depending on the platform or is that not being right – you know you don’t have a consistent footprint across. What do you think?
With any brand, the starting point is what is the brand really about? What are you really about? What therefore is the idea you represent? What value do you add to peoples lives? The meaning that you are adding to peoples lives. That is the fundamental starting point for everything. It’s very important to be clear about it. Are you somebody who is an oracle? Are you somebody who is actually empathetic, understands and gets into and really gets into the specific needs of the situation and do you help people navigate at every little turn and curve in their lives? Is that the kind of relationship or value you’re adding ? Are you the brilliant ideas kind of person and throws 40 ideas at people and is that your thing? Are you an operating kind of fixer of things, diagnosis? There are several ideas that exist. So, it’s important first to be clear about what and who you are as a brand.
Does it mean self-awareness? What would I like to be? Which of these?
Fundamentally what am I driven by – what is the value I add? What value then from the other side. What value is being sort and what is the alignment between the value being provided and the value being sort? How will I come through to the other person, because that’s what a brand eventually is to just understand that. Therefore if there is a gap between what I am and what is needed – is that something realistically that I can bridge, so how?
“PERSONAL BRAND: Who am I and what do I represent? What is the value that I provide? How do I communicate that? ”
How do I amplify the things that are valuable to the market and in what way do I then amplify? So, the how is actually a down streamed question. The more important questions is the Who and the What. Who am I and what do I represent? What is the value that I provide? How do I communicate that? And then the questions like what is important is the idea is coherent. It is not important that you have the same sort of look and feel in every medium that you are on.
In our lives, I think that’s too simplistic notion of a brand. That is uniformity, it is not coherence. Coherence is that fact that you are in essence the same wherever you might be. Uniformity is you then dress the same way, you take that to the extent of actually sort of appearing the same everywhere. I don’t think that is necessary. There is absolutely nothing wrong if every medium has its own grammar.
With the understanding of the grammar of the medium, who you are, that cannot change is presented in a way that understands the grammar of one medium over the other and therefore fine tunes the way that you present yourself is absolutely fine. We do it instinctively. For instance, when I’m talking to you and you are asking me these questions, the way that I would respond if I had a written interview and the same questions were asked, the way that I would have answered these would have been different. There would have been a formality of language which is greater even if I didn’t want to, it would have been different.
Every medium has its own logic, its own vocabulary, its own grammar. I think its essential for us to recognize that
A lot of people say that since my customers are predominantly millennials, I should be on Instagram. But my customers are predominantly working professionals, older, I should be on twitter. Is that kind of a great strategy, what do you think – for personal brand?
Recognizing the market, like in any media, if you are doing in for a brand, you would do it exactly like that – where are my customers, consumers? The whole point of being present somewhere is so that you’re seen, particularly when you are marketing yourself. It is very important to ask that question.
If your consumers are millennials, then it’s important to be where the millennials are. It’s important to speak in a way where millennials will tune in. That is not being inauthentic, otherwise there is no point in communicating in the first place. Communication is succeeding in getting your message across, may be transmitting. I absolutely see that as necessary that if one is in the business of actually promoting one’s own brand, then I think one must play by the rules of and one must to do it like any other brand would do.
This year has been very different from the previous years say the least, but when you look at the year going forward, would you think that the way brands would evolve next year, would it be fundamentally different. What is your take? Would the communication patterns be different? What is your view on next year? What do you see happening, because potentially the vaccine is going to take a while to come back to everybody? So, how do you think communication patterns will change between people?
I don’t think there is a fundamentally structural shift that I expect in the next one year certainly. What I do expect is sentiment will lead rather than lag – recovery. Brands and businesses have all been waiting to change the narrative. So, I do expect that there is going to be a great preemptive need that brands will feel to change and bring about positivity because, businesses are suffering and they feel the need to start pushing for change. I do think that somewhat ahead of the curve, before the vaccine is actually available in numbers, we will see a lot more communication happen from the sides of brands. There will be a great desire because in the immediate aftermath the turning of the tide, things start looking positive and we are likely to see a fairly strong return of consumption.
I don’t think it’ll last simply because economically there’s been a lot of damage and therefore it’ll be a while before any kind of normalcy returns in a durable sense. But in the short term, there’s a lot of pent up desire that all of us have – whether it is in our own lives, whether it’s in acts of consumption, whether it’s in terms of entertainment and travel, there is a lot of pent up need to look at the world with a positive lens again. I have a feeling that next year we are going to see a lot of attempts made by organizations, brands to drum up good feeling. How long it lasts, I don’t know but my sense is that against this year we will see and perhaps ahead of the curve , things actually start changing on the ground, you will see communication begin to change.
When you look at what it means for employee brand, the way leaders communicate with their employees. Today, many of them do a lot of communication in the sense you’ll find employees complain that there are way too many webinars and video meetings all day long. So, they are definitely complaining about that. At the same time a lot of them don’t feel that enough communication is happening. That’s the irony of the matter. You ask the leaders and they’ll say we’re spending so much of time talking to people all the time. So, is it that they should be looking at one is to one kind of communication and therefore people feel that – yes I’ve been spoken too. Because the context is completely different now – say how people respond to communication in a meeting room or a town hall where 400 people are standing versus me sitting there at my desk or my bed and working with a laptop, is a very different experience of work. So, what should be done differently in terms of communicating ideas?
The important thing in any act of communication is that how much time have you spent understanding the mindset of the person you’re communicating to. The biggest gap often comes because webinar is not communication. A webinar is a format, it’s simply a template and it’s an invitation as I can testify from personal experience wherein you have the great ability to switch on the camera and mute your own and there’s great freedom to strategically appear at periodic intervals to register your presence and it’s quite possible.
So, it doesn’t mean that communication has happened. Even a physical meeting doesn’t mean communication has happened. Communication happens if you understand what the other person is feeling and is anxious about, is grappling with and you address that. The problem of overcommunication is not that you are communicating too much, it’s still that you’re not communicating enough in meaningful sense.
So one to one communication certainly, inherently has the advantage of having to account for the other person’s mindset. It obviously becomes more difficult as groups become larger. It has to do with the tonality and transparency with which communication is taking place. The combination of the fact that really investing time – not just in the context of the pandemic, baring the kind of internal sort of climate surveys that are done, in a meaningful sense, how many times have employers researched employees. You research consumers all the time.
Why don’t we ever have a employee research unit ever in any organization, at least I’m not aware of any, why?
Exactly, because you don’t want to know. In some ways, employers feel that – let’s not understand too much – you’re opening a can of worms. It just becomes an invitation in a sense for a whole litany of issues.
Do they do anything? Does it give you any insight at all – climate surveys?
Rather than not having any sort of a feedback mechanism, to have some sort of a feedback mechanism is certainly useful. Eventually any survey of this kind is an outcome measurement, its not a process measurement. It’s not a diagnostic and what you need is the kind of research you do with consumers – what drives them? What goes beyond what they’re saying on the surface? Where are they coming from? What real consumer research means is that.
It’s not asking them to fill up forms and tabulating it. That is the most rudimentary superficial form of research. If you have to contrast that with the kind of work that is done with employees, it is very superficial. It’s an end state measurement, which has value, it has only that much value. Which is the reason why there is such mystification at times when you talk about the fact that you have the millennial employees and we don’t understand them, but you’ve not tried to understand them. Where does understanding come from? You come from a completely different world, completely different era, you have different value systems. How will you understand the mindset of a completely different cohort if you don’t make the effort? And that effort organizations don’t make. So, the problem with communication is actually the problem with understanding which gets revealed as a problem in communication.
Are these terms, millennials, Gen Z, Gen X – are these even relevant in India? Would you use a different categorization?
I would absolutely not use this categorization.
I don’t think these terms exist in India. We’ve just happily taken something from the West – baby boomers – India has never experienced baby boomers
It’s the same thing like we have in fashion we have the fall season and the autumn. What is fall? It’s exactly the same thing. The only place where I do believe there is a narrowing of the gap between – baby boomers is utterly ridiculous. But I would certainly say that in India the mobile phone generation is a cohort. And therefore, to correspond it broadly whether you take one which is a mobile phone generation and the other is a smart phone / touch screen generation and if you were to separate those two a little artificially, you could theoretically argue that there is a millennial kind of behaviour in one and a Gen Z like behaviour in the other.
So, there might be a little more correspondence simply because they are predicated on technology that’s diffused to the world more or less at the same time. Whereas the other influences that went to calling something baby boomers or Gen X were exclusive to the West. To that extent I think there is perhaps a little more kind of reason to use these terminologies today. However we describe them, the idea that you have a completely different cohort with a completely different view of the world and technology and how you use technology is one of the biggest determinants of change.
It’s one of the determinants of how we think, how we process the world, what we value, what our priorities are – all of it gets reshaped. There is a fundamental gap that exists between people who grew up in a pre-kind of digital era and people who have grown up since. So, if we don’t make that effort in trying to understand that, then we are forever condemned to think of them as another breed and patronize them or get bewildered or just pontificate and sound off their alleged kind of misdemeanors.