Brand Strategy & Architecture

In today’s competitive world, with the increasing commoditisation of virtually every product and service, businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to differentiate their offerings.

Vertebrand has deep-domain expertise in advising clients on how best to differentiate their products or services from competition. Using scientific research methodologies and consumer insight techniques, we help you to arrive at a rigorous left-brained solution of what the brand should do. This includes nomenclature, the branding and sub-branding system, a house of brands versus a branded house and all the other details that need to be finalized. And we help you do it before you and your agency rush into spending money on advertising and communication.

Digital Strategy & Engagement

In an increasingly digital world, using a clicks-and-mortar model of reaching customers, has become an absolute necessity. While everyone realises the power of the on-line medium, amazingly there is very little knowledge going around on the why and what of the digital medium. Most digital marketing firms are spending only in the ‘how,’ which means digital campaigns, social media posts and other means of communication.

What is really important is to have a thorough understanding of the purchase behaviour of our target customers in the digital space.

Using a blend of data analysis, research and trend-mapping, Vertebrand can provide clients tailor-made solutions to develop online reach programmes and initiatives to foster continuous digital engagement. We also use measuring techniques to monitor progress, make on-going course corrections and maximise your share of the customer’s digital wallet.

Business Strategy

V-Nova helps you to formulate a winning strategy that help you achieve sustainable competitive advantage and profitability.

We provide sector-specific consulting for fundamental strategic challenges such as growth and diversification. Our ability to uncover hidden consumer needs and develop innovative solutions to meet those needs has enabled our clients to discover new revenue streams and new business models. We also assist our clients with development of detailed financial and operational plans.

V-Nova also has the capability and senior management skills to execute recommendations and ensure they work as planned.

V-Nova uses its proprietary tool, V-Max, to optimise inventory across the supply chain. We go well beyond the conventional boundaries of supply chain management to fix fundamental processes that lead to unproductive inventory. These extend across both the front end and back end of demand management.

Our process starts with an in-depth analysis of data. This helps us to understand the issues at different nodes of the supply chain. This will therefore help us to devise methods to manage inventory optimally to fulfil demand at desirable service levels. The strategy, process and techniques are integrated seamlessly into a decision support system that can be executed very easily by the planning team. Our key advantage is the simplicity of our solution.

We recognise that capability and maturity levels of organisations differ vastly. So we design solutions that are “Just Right” for your organisation ranging from quick process, techniques and application interventions to more evolved tech based solutions using artificial intelligence. We focus on ensuring “right product, right time, right place” to maximize value to your business whether it be through margin enhancement, reduction of lost sales, increase in ROI of inventory, Increase in stock turns, or optimised SKU offerings.

Our solutions are always tailored to your organisation’s needs to ensure effectiveness. Easy to adopt, our inventory management solutions typically result in inventory reduction of 20–30 % at the same level of demand.

Last but not least we train your team to understand and execute our solutions. Helping you with recruitment where necessary.

The market reconnaissance tool.

V-Scan is your best weapon in your fight for market share. It is an unfortunate truth that brand failure rates in general are very high. And India is no exception. It will be even more difficult in these post-Covid, China-antagonistic times.

V-Scan is a tool that has been specifically designed to give you the knowledge you need to plan a proper campaign to become strong and viable business – whether B2C or B2B – with clear directions for an effective product, business and brand strategy. Comprising key components like opportunity assessment, detailed mapping of the competition and of distribution channels, identification of your ideal target consumer, insightful consumer knowledge, locational analysis and more, V-Scan provides credible and actionable answers to all your questions.

Vertebrand has formidable expertise and experience in opportunity assessment and business plan preparation. The V-Scan tool has been implemented on behalf of multiple industries and for numerous consumer products. The tool has been even been used for MNCs wanting to enter India. The business plans that have prepared with the aid of this tool have been used to generate venture funding, as well as to launch or revitalise businesses.

The tool is supported by Vertebrand’s unparalleled experience of India, Indian industry and Indian conditions to give you a specific plan for the entire country, a specific state of even a specific city.

The Brand Valuation tool.

John Hegarty probably said it best, “Always remember: a brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world; a corner of someone’s mind.” Vertebrand concurs with this view, believing the intrinsic value of a brand resides in the consumer mind-space it occupies.

Therefore, the Vertebrand approach to brand valuation blends both consumer-focused and financial-focused models. It uses a 360-degree format for evaluating brand performance – feedback from consumers or customers, channel partners, influencers, investors and other target groups.

Your Brand's Blueprint

Based on a rigorous market scan and thorough understanding of your brands’ current equity, Vertebrand will help you define your brand’s proposition or re-engineer it when necessary.

The foundation of Vertebrand’s branding process, V-ShapeTM first moulds the VintellityTM of your brand. The VintellityTM of a brand has two facets: personality (brand behaviour) and intelligence (brand capabilities). It is the foundation on which the Vertebrand Arrow™ is built in an interactive workshop involving both Vertebrand’s senior leadership and yours. At the end of this workshop, the brand blueprint will be created and captured as the Vertebrand Arrow™, which outlines:

·     The core target customer for the brand

·     The heritage of the organization

·     The category and input intelligences

·     Brand Personality – this expresses the Brand Behaviour

·     Core and Peripheral values of the brand

·     Brand Essence

·     The functional and emotional promise of the brand

·     Brand positioning statement

By harnessing your people and your design thinking and creativity, the Vertebrand will help your brand stand out from the other brands in the market, and make an unique offering to the consumer by establishing your brand’s relevance and strengthening its emotional connect with

its customers.

Further, the Vertebrand Arrow™ is your brand blueprint and will serve as your guide and reference point for all activities related to the brand. This includes key decisions in terms of products, distribution, pricing, advertising, PR, activation and other communication. It will help you decide the look and feel of the brand and be your primary means of briefing the advertising agency, activation agency and digital marketing agency.

Training Modules for improving your people's skill

Vertebrand has several teaching modules that will enable you to improve the skills of your people.

Presentation Skills Workshop

One of any consulting organization’s key strengths lies in the presentation of ideas and recommendations. In the Post-Covid era, this will become an important element in the armory of any company. It will be absolutely vital to have people who can make and design presentations and express themselves in front of an audience.

Vertebrand’s Presentation Skills workshop teaches the techniques great presenters like Steve Jobs and many TED speakers use and will help your people to present and sell your company’s work with more style, and therefore confidence and conviction. The workshop incorporates several guidelines and ways and means of doing this effectively. By putting your people through this rigor, you will increase your company’s batting average when it comes to selling your products and services.

Depending on the number of people involved and the amount of time you have, the workshop can take anywhere between two hours and two days.

Writing Skills Training

In the post-Covid world, when physical distancing will be a prime requirement for avoiding infection, more and more business will be conducted through email and correspondence. It will be vital for your people to be able to write better and communicate their ideas clearly, succinctly and evocatively. And this will be essential, whether they are required to write emails, reports, proposals or any other document. This workshop will enable them to do exactly that.

The end result will be a workforce that is better equipped to clearly write and express their point of view in a time when it is likely that much work will be conducted in writing rather than in person.

The training course will take 3 weeks at approximately 3 hours a day with homework, assessments and feedback.

The brand report card

In most cases, managers are unable to step back and assess their brand’s particular strengths and weaknesses objectively. Most have a good sense of one or two areas in which their brand may excel or may need help. But when you’re immersed in the day-to-day management of a brand, it’s not easy to keep in perspective all the parts that affect the whole. In fact, it is difficult to identify all of the factors they should be considering.

V-Scope identifies the key characteristics that your brands need and helps you to construct a brand report card in a systematic way. It will help you to think about how to grade your brand’s performance for each of those characteristics.

The V-Scope report will help you to identify the areas that need improvement, recognise areas in which your brand is strong, and learn more about how your particular brand is configured. Constructing similar report cards for your competitors can give you a clearer picture of their strengths and weaknesses.

VCathlon™ is a two-day strategy workshop that will use the knowledge and skills of key members of your senior team, facilitated by senior partners at Vertebrand, to help you decide how and where you will pivot when the time comes.

Like a Decathlon, this workshop consists of a series of strenuous exercises. It is divided into three-parts conducted over two days:

1) Hop. The workshop's first part helps you use the Theory of Constraints (TOC) and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to identify the areas you can fix immediately. This will be depicted graphically in a Current Reality Tree (CRT). Then, we will find short-term fixes that will save costs or improve efficiency. These fixes are geared towards buying you time to Pivot.

2) Skip. In this part of the workshop we will use the Scenario Development technique and consider changes in: Market and competition, Consumers and influencers, Channels and trade, Vendors and Supply Chain. This exercise will help us understand the world that will likely emerge and prepare the organization and the business to succeed in the new situation.

3) Jump. At the end of the V-Cathlon workshop we will be able to identify ways to move quickly and decisively and pivot into new ways of working, functioning and doing business. We will get the Early Mover advantage by tracking key indicators and triggers. This will give you a choice of solutions that can be rapidly implemented and scaled up. Clearly articulated go-to-market plans for all scenarios. Identified organizational changes to manage change. And finally, financial preparedness to pump in any required investments to quickly scale up when the recovery starts.

Vertebrand will help you with their extensive experience in TOC-based Business Analysis and RCA, Scenario Development and Planning, in addition to other proprietary tools. The conclusions will be reached by your own senior team, but they will be facilitated by Vertebrand’s senior partners who have over 100 person-years of experience at running top-end businesses, managing turnarounds, and building strategies. If necessary, Vertebrand can also help you to implement the action plans, hand-holding your team throughout the pivot.

Scientifially optimized channel and distribution plans

The success of a business depends on marketing, sales and distribution planning. This process requires an in-depth understanding of your own network, the landscape of the market and the input of an expert from the industry. In this context, Vertebrand brings to you V-Max.

V-Max is unique tool that is designed for you, as your organization’s marketing and sales head, to incorporate into your business and marketing planning. The tool uses proprietary methodology that develops optimised channel and distribution plans based on sales and market share objectives. This helps you to develop sales force requirements, coverage norms, sales force and distribution performance parameters. In short, V-Max generates a plan as well as metrics for tracking performance over time.

The Outputs From This Tool Would Be

·     Market share targets

·     Optimum outlet coverage

·     Revenue expectations

·     Options for distribution models

·     Optimum salesforce structure

·     Coverage norms

·     Productivity of calls

Key Features And Differentiators

·     Allows multiple distribution model options

·     Optimization of distribution

·     Coverage, call-age and productivity parameters for planning and tracking

·     Tech-enabled product for quick deployment and turnaround

A workshop to facilitate ideas

In this post-Covid era, the one thing that will be absolutely vital will be new ways of doing business, new products, new ways of handling people and new processes.

In the form of our two-day V-Imagine workshop, Vertebrand has a proven process to facilitate the development of new ideas. The workshop will expedite your own process of ideation and help you and your people to come up with ideas that will grow your business; take you into new areas; or find spaces to diversify within your area of competence.

The workshop incorporates close to 100 different techniques that help people arrive at ideas. It can be implemented among any group as long as they speak English. One place where this workshop was used was at ITC where a group comprising scientific and consumer researchers, and brand managers came up with over 150 new product ideas for a detergent.

The end result that you can expect is a list of ideas that can be implemented to change or improve your business. Vertebrand can also help you to check out and rate the ideas as a separate process.

Aligning people with the company culture

A first-of-its-kind tool in India, V-Entropy™ is a simple, easy-to-use suite of products. Through this product, Vertebrand’s people alignment practice, V-Encompass, helps business leaders and HR leaders align a company’s employees with its external customer promise.

With V-Entropy™ we can assist your company to align your people to your customer promise at three levels – the individual, the functional and the organisational. Thus ensuring the profitable growth of your business.

V-Entropy™ is perhaps the only product in the country that actually quantifies the degree of alignment between people equity and brand equity and recommends specific corrective measures. This knowledge becomes the basis for a series of seminars, training programs and communication to help you inculcate the identified values. The results of these actions can then be measured to ascertain the degree of success.

Operational efficiency enhancement

In a Covid impacted VUCA world, when demand generation is incredibly tough, the role of effective and efficient cost Management is the pivot around which success needs to be built.

The V-Creff tool addresses precisely this need with a comprehensive analysis and diagnostics of all costs and uses multiple methods to make your money work harder and better.

The V-Creff methodology encompasses 6 steps:

·     Determination of the strategic converged choice of objectives

·     Scenario planning with trigger-based change capability

·     Deep-dive identification of key constraints and their unlock solutions

·     Comprehensive analysis of costs and investments that add value across the business

·     Resource planning for effective execution and Oversight

·     Road map articulation and communication strategies and plans to generate organisational commitment.

We combine financial prudence and operational understanding to develop innovative solutions so that you can make necessary adjustments for the “New normal.” What is more, we ensure that all these are done with minimal impact to brand equity as we understand its importance particularly in a difficult situation of compressed demand.

Finally, we will hold your hands through implementation to ensure success of the recommendation