Everyone wants to be a brand

Messer’s Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co, have a lot to answer for. Their leveraged buyouts in the 1980s created a long-lasting interest in the enormous value of ‘brands’. But even they could not have imagined just how much this business of brands would infiltrate the life of people in the years to come. It’s turned so bad now that not only is everything you use - from toes to topknot - a brand, everyone too is a brand! The word, like a malevolent air-borne virus, is everywhere. It permeates all conversation and all walks of life.

So it is not uncommon to hear of a certain cricketer’s ‘brand’ of cricket or a TV producer’s ‘brand’ of TV soaps (the TV shows produced by the reigning Queen of soaps having taken over the mantle of lather from Lux as the ‘Beauty soaps of the stars’).

The B-word is now also widely used by giggly, breathless girl-reporters, as they report from fashion shows and gasp at the unwearable offerings of ‘brands’ of gelled, pedicured and manicured designers. Serious-faced reporters on business TV channels use it as they discuss a businessman’s ‘brand’ of management. And of course the entertainment pages are full of interviews where effete directors talk about their ‘brand’ of films.

You got it: today, everyone is a brand. So perhaps it is time to consider the typology and myriad dimensions of this phenomenon.

Acquiring brand-hood

The first thing to remember is that while everyone is a brand, some are born brands, some acquire brand-hood and others have branding thrust upon them.

Abhishek Bachchan clearly is a case of a born brand; given his genetic configuration, it could not have been otherwise. So too are sundry other star-progeny. And the progenitors could be actors, businessmen, politicians; essentially anyone who himself/herself has a claim to being a brand. Baby Suri, manufactured by Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes is even more so: she was a brand before she was even born! She could be the first case in recorded history to be what one could call a ‘branded foetus’.

Others acquire brand-hood. Dhoni acquired ‘branded’ status with his swashbuckling style. So did Sehwag. Both acquired it fairly soon after they were launched, so to say. Dravid took longer. He had to lay the foundation for a long time, before he could become the brand we know as ‘The Wall’.

And then of course there are the ones who have branding thrust upon them. Perhaps I should say that co-branding is thrust upon them. M. Night Shymalan has no particular desire to be co-branded with India, but journalists will insist on finding some way of describing him so that he becomes a co-branded entity: ‘Of Indian origin’ or ‘India-born’ are common mechanisms employed to do this. Others want to do the same to Bobby Jindal, though what he wants is to be co-branded ‘American’ in the ‘Senator’ product category. We want to do it to VS Naipaul too, even though in his case, the tenuous link for such co-branding became defunct several generations ago.

Me-too brands

If it happens in business, it will happen in life. A new ‘product category’ came into being with the invention of the term, ‘item song’. Barely (pun intended) had Shefali Jariwala and Meghna Naidu gyrated and bit their lips in music videos to achieve brand-hood, that an entire shipment of me-too brands arrived; the same pudgy midriff, the same lascivious look, the same absence of any sign of intelligence disturbing their expression.

Rakhi Sawant is only a more recent specimen of the me-too brands of exposed adipose tissue. In an earlier era these buxom brands were also associated with specific product categories such as textiles. Who can forget the entire batch of fabric softeners represented by Silk Smitha, Nylex Nalini and others? But the trend died out, before others like Rexine Rekha and Kevlar Kavitha could make their mark.

Relevant and irrelevant taglines

If Nike has ‘Just do it’ and Asian Paints has ‘Har ghar kuchh kehta hai’, person-brands too, want or are given different taglines and ‘product descriptors’.

And there are some people brands whose taglines are as memorable as these examples. On the other hand, ‘sexy new starlet’ or ‘volcano of talent’ are completely ineffective in clearly identifying a specific person.

Here then, is today’s quiz on People-Brand lines and descriptors:

Q1: Who is known as ‘India’s liquor baron’?
Q2: Which actor was called the ‘Thespian’?
Q3: Who is called ‘The world’s richest man’?
Q4: Who is called the ‘Sarod Maestro’?

If you got Vijay Mallya, Dilip Kumar, Bill Gates and Amjad Ali Khan right, it just goes to show that these brands have come to own certain specific properties or descriptors.

But not everyone can have such exclusive right to entire product categories.

Nevertheless there are other ways to gain differentiation. So while Sunil Gavaskar was ‘The Little Master’, Sachin Tendulkar became the ‘Master Blaster’.

However, these epithets get used equally often in valid and invalid situations. For example, it may be appropriate to say that, “Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar scored a quick-fire 45 off just 23 balls,” but it is a bit much to caption a picture from his birthday celebrations with the words, “Master Blaster Sachin Tendulkar about to cut his birthday cake,” suggesting that he is shortly going to bludgeon the baked item with his weighty willow.

This irrelevant use of a descriptor has broken new ground in the case of a certain tennis player. It is not uncommon to read that, “The Hyderabadi lass fought well in the second set.” What does her play have to do with where she is from? Do we want reports saying, “And the Ichalkaranji boy announced that he would be launching a new banking software package”? Or that “The 24-Parganas danseuse performed the Mohiniattam with grace”?

Of course mere irrelevance pales in comparison to the positively bizarre, as in “The teen sensation was thrashed 2-6, 3-6 in the first round of the…”

Borrowed branding

And then there is ‘borrowed-branding’. This was invented to make memorable, perfectly forgettable ladies in their launch stage in films. Kiera Knightly was an unknown and had to be propped up as the ‘Bend it like Beckham beauty’. After she got a role in a more successful film she became, ‘Pirates of the Caribbean beauty’. And you have ‘Lara Croft beauty Angelina Jolie’ and ‘Spiderman beauty Kirsten Dunst’ and so on. You will note that the word ‘beauty’ is used quite liberally and indiscriminately.

But there are times when even reporters know it would be going too far to call someone a beauty; and so the words ‘hotel heiress’ are employed as a substitute, to provide some borrowed branding to a vacuous bimbo, although her name itself borrows from geography and the hospitality industry.

The most extreme cases of borrowed - or what might be called ‘attributed’ - branding are to be found in Page 3 coverage. Consider for example the number of people who are branded ‘Socialite’. The term is used as if it represents a philosophic orientation, like ‘Luddite’ or ‘Trotskyite’; or a species of animal life like ‘Troglodyte’. In fact, one suspects it only means, “We know this person is rich, but we really don’t know if the person actually does anything other than attend parties.”

And thus it is in the fitness of things that the term ‘poster boy’ has come to be employed as a part of the strategy to launch various citizens as brands. And if some of the posters look a bit frayed fairly quickly, well, you know what they say about the short life cycle of brands in the 21st century.