Indian Companies Spend less than 10% of Brand budget on Brand Culture

A survey conducted amongst nearly 100 CEO's in Indai and published today suggests that Indian companies spend only 10% of their brand budget on Brand Culture projects.

According to a report, most organizations spend less than 10 percent of their brand budget on Brand Culture programs - the process of helping your staff understand your brands values, mission and behaviours and live them in their every day work.

According to the survey, in most of the companies, the HR department forms the Brand Culture budget and only 22 percent of the companies, which were surveyed engage marketing departments in the budgeting stages. And also the Indian companies maintain to rely on traditional channels for their employer branding. About 78 percent depend on their career site to broaden their brand message, followed by campus outreach programmes, while 40 percent of the companies use print media to advertise employer branding messaging.

Sanjay Modi, Managing Director, Monster.com, said, "Building an employer brand is like building a brand from its inception stage. A CEO could be an ideal custodian of employer branding. If we look at any established employer brand, we'll find that it is built through a systematic, sustainable effort with active involvement of all stakeholders, driven by the CEO. Our survey among 85 CEOs in Indian organizations reveals that more than 70 percent of organizations spend less than 10 percent of their overall brand budget on employer branding. This indicates a level of unwillingness to take serious steps towards building an employer brand."

In organisations, branding is constantly a top program for the marketing teams, while most of their efforts seem to focus on product branding. Moreover, 46 percent do not seek professional support for marketing Brand Culture Programs.

Regardless, of the focus there has been an increase in interest and awareness among CEOs on Brand Culture Programs.

I have written extensivelty about the need for orgnaisations to focus not only on the message they are delivering to their customers through products and services, marketing channels and media. It is proven time and time again that sucessful organisations like Ford, South West Airlines, Starbuck's, Orange, Nike, Singapore Airlines and many more, consider Brand Culture to be on a par with financial deliverables.

In many cases, creating a great culture in an organisation will attract and retain the very best staff - I call them the A's and B's, it will attract and retain the very best customers - loyal and trusting.

Many orgnaisations have used brand culture programs to redefine their businesses. Take Ford for example, one of the key factors in the dramatic turn around succes of Ford is their Brand Culture Program, where it was not uncommon to see the CEO speaking to production line workers and front line staff about what it means to work for Ford. The result, every single company member pushing in the same direction, all committed to delivering results.

As we see Indian Brands evolving and competition increasing in that market, we will see smart CEO's investing time and budget in build solid brand culture programs in their organisations - because they will realise the benefits of doing so. We are seeing it a Tata, a company where the Chairman leads by example. We need to see it at more companies too - and I am confident we will.

For more reading on Brand Culture, please read: