Reliance juggles with 35 varied brands

Chennai, June 20 If you thought managing a handful of brands for a company was a task enough then consider the country’s largest company, Reliance Industries, which lists in its annual report at least 35 brands that it deals with.

While the country’s largest brand marketer, Hindustan Unilever, also deals with 35 disparate consumer brands, the difference is that most of Reliance’s brands, except for a few such as its textiles brand Vimal and Harmony for furnishings, use the Reliance tag. And, most of them are industrial brands.

The company’s latest annual report lists one refinery brand in Reliance Gas, five polymer brands (which serves as inputs for HDPE/ LDPE packaging material and PVC) with names such as Repol and Relene, two chemical brands (which go into detergents), 11 polyester brands, which are variations of Recron, which go into pillows and apparel, Vimal for textiles, Harmony for furnishings, RueRel for suitings and, of course, Reliance’s latest foray — retail — which lists 16 brands, most of which take the Reliance tag as an umbrella brand.

Says Mr Paresh Chaudhry, Group President, Corporate Communications, RIL, “Very clearly, we are using our powerful brand equity for customers and consumers both. In industry it is well known since there are limited customers who buy directly and find a connect with the end user. Reliance Retail is new and we are leveraging Reliance as a prefix everywhere and it’s working well.”

Mr Chaudhry says that the company had undertaken consumer studies before the Reliance Retail formats were rolled out and post launch, he said, vindicated the findings that using Reliance as an umbrella brand would help recall. Without advertising, as yet, and by offering a great consumer experience and word of mouth the retail formats are growing, says Mr Chaudhry.

Says brand consultant Harish Bijoor, “The company has been using the mother corporate brand name on everything, from footwear to jewellery, in retail. The attempt is to extend the brand in a continuous manner. In this way, investment in building completely new brands is avoided, recall value is quick, brand residue build up is instantaneous and the effort is more single-minded.”

Losing depth

However, those are the pros; Mr Bijoor says the cons are many too. When the brand is extended too thin, it loses depth, he says.

“Further, when a brand means everything to everybody, it means nothing specific to any one person. This is dangerous,” he adds.

As he explains, a brand essentially has two facets. One is width and the other is depth. Depth is all about single-minded focus and the ability of a brand to cultivate customers and their like over a period of time. The other facet is width. This is all about how wide the brand is, how it is spread across categories. “This is, however, a shallow trait. When a brand spreads, you compromise on depth. This is the Reliance problem.”

Says a senior executive with a brand valuation firm, “Reliance Retail reflects the challenges of evolution of a traditional product (commodity) brand trying to deliver a customer experience. Many brands have stumbled here. It is about time they did something really well with that huge reservoir of brand value or it will surely but slowly weaken in the long run.”

However, put these questions to Reliance’s Mr Chaudhry and he says that Reliance is an expert in executing projects well and the ultimate test is whether consumers come to its stores. And, as of now, he says, they are flocking to the Reliance-branded stores.