Branding

In today’s highly competitive market, a good Brand is what differentiates a product from others in the eyes of customers. Customer has more confidence in the quality of a Branded item than an unbranded one. For instance, most customers will look for Colgate brand of toothpaste when they go to shopping mall. It does not mean that Colgate is the best quality of toothpaste available in the market. There are other brands which are as good as Colgate but customers do not perceive the value in other Brands. Brand is created through marketing campaign, packaging, advertisements etc. Branding is done in job market also. A potential candidate from a good Business School carries a Brand just like a commodity. He is not necessarily a better candidate than a candidate from other institutions but companies in India perceive him to be better suited than others. They don’t mind giving him a fat salary and perks. These companies compete with each other in giving highest salary ever and even take pride in publicizing it in newapapers and electronic media. The suitability of the candidate is not looked at at all. This is a classic case of Branding. My experience is that most of MBA’s from premier B-Schools like IIMs are arrogant, highly ambitious, Self centered, Egoistic. They don’t stick to the company for more than 6 months with the result they hardly contribute anything to the growth of the company . They are only interested in more and more salary and position and keep on hopping from one company to another carrying the tag of MBA from IIM. They are a pampered lot. They may have high level of IQ but they fail miserably in other areas. Bill Gate of Microsoft is a school dropout but he is heading the most prestigious organization in the world. You don’t need to be an MBA to be a visionary and leader. There are several live examples that can be given to corroborate this statement. If you study the salary structure of corporate companies, you will find that 20% employees get 80% of total salary disbursed in the company. This is highly biased and skewed in favour of employees at middle level and top level management who are invariably MBAs.The difference in fixed salary between an ordinary employee and the CEO is more than 100 times which is unrealistic . Weightage should be given to the contribution of the employee towards the long term and short term objective of the company rather than the qualification. If the KRA of each employee is defined in such a way that it is aligned with corporate goals, it will be possible to measure the contribution of each employee towards the corporate objective. Total package given to employees should include fixed salary and performance based incentive in the ratio of 30:70. I am happy to note that infosys is following this practice wherein everybody from juniormost employee to CEO are getting same fixed salary as has been disclosed by Narayan Murthy in one of the T.V. interviews. Every employee of Infosys is given ESOPs which creates the sense of ownership among employees and increases loyalty towards the company. We should emulate the Japanese companies wherein all Japanese with MBAs from Harward university are made to slog for 2 years under the juniormost employee of the company so that they become down to earth and understand the ground reality of Local Japanese condition rather than copying blindly Western concepts and Theories.