Let’s Talk Branding | Manil Dodani

Manil Dodani

Business and Marketing, Director, APAC at Landor & Fitch

With brands like Tata Neu, Zepto, Apraava, Mahindra, Chargebee under his belt, Manil is currently working as Business and Marketing Director, APAC at Landor & Fitch. He believes that brand and design, drive tangible business results and solve real-life problems.

Creativity, with its limitless potential, aids designers in solving challenging issues. Unfortunately, creativity is not defined, and everyone has their interpretation of it. What is your notion of creativity?

Design makes a problem easy to understand helping customers choose their preferred solution. Designers should make the design more efficient, optimized, and intuitive. To accomplish the task of converting a problem into a design solution, one should become a brief writer. Merging the ability to define the intent of the design, and then designing it results in a more targeted, commercially viable solution.

Brands are meant to create a feeling therefore if you identify the right feeling first then that feeling must be reflected in your strategy.

In a deeper meaning, branding is a set of expectations and memories serving as a promise to buyers. Translating brand strategy into reality is delicate, turning words into images and ideas into graphics. What should be done while transitioning from strategy to design for making your brand look professional, unique, and smart?

Think about the outcome you are trying to derive. Design solves a problem while instigating an emotional response. Do you want the user to feel happy, clever, or charged up when they use your product? Brands are meant to create a feeling, so if you have identified an emotional response, then that response is what your strategy and design must rally to achieve. Design and strategy depend on how you wish to evoke emotional responses. So my advice is to write what happens when your brand is interacted with. How one reacts is your end reaction and then you go back to the first step and write the strategy and create the design.

Brand differentiation is not found; It is created. How can designers find the hidden meaning behind the brands and create differentiation?

A brand can be differentiated by design, positioning, or both. A brand that is built on a true human insight is truly differentiated. The question a customer might ask before buying a brand is, ‘Are you truly different in solving a problem that I care about?’ Or is the brand something that is just being packaged to be sold differently? Positioning is relative to your competition and stems from a differentiating offer. Branding cannot save a bad product or service.

To start brand positioning, think about the various human insights it is based on, to solve a problem that is different from others, and then you proceed to design to sell that solution uniquely. One example that comes to mind is Dyson. The fundamental problem with vacuum cleaners is that there are so many parts, so Dyson took that away and said that cleaning homes can be easier and should not be seen as a chore. In one of our projects at Landor & Fitch, we sold burgers, by saying burgers are meant to be messy. The truth is, burgers today are sold in a templatized fashion so, in reality, they look completely different from the ads.

It only needs one simple click to abandon a brand, and less than a minute at the keyboard to complain about it to millions. What is the importance of emotions in brand strategy? How can we accelerate brand growth through emotional connections?

People buy products or services because they want to feel younger, faster, or better, either socially or otherwise. A powerful strategy that focuses on driving one human emotion throughout. For example, Nike puts an asterisk over athletes on their website and mentions ‘If you have a body, you are an athlete.’ They focus on the fact that anybody can push the limits of a human body to become an athlete. So, every good strategy drives an emotion. Link your brand to a certain emotion, and a market is found. Next, build a brand to address that market.

Design is a process of synthesis, exploration, and discovery through stories. How can designers improve their storytelling skills to craft their design process?

Storytelling is the most integral part of branding because stories reveal more than facts. One of the best and most known frameworks to write a story is the StoryBrand format, according to which, the customer is the hero, the problem is the villain and the brand is the guide that is helping the customer fight the problem, leading to positive outcomes that change the hero’s life. That changes the angle for the brand, making it not self-referential, but more about how you can help the customer. The best example is Apple, which does not position itself as the world’s most powerful computer, but rather as a tool for self-expression. The ‘Apple Underdogs’ campaign follows a group of 4 people in an office setting using Apple products to change the situation, making their journey easier throughout

A brand is a promise and a great brand is that promise kept.

Creation is the core of life for any designer. Design is about iterating and evolving. How can designers prepare for innovations in the new market and further evolve the trend according to customer psychology?

Customer psychology is crucial to understand as it leads to customer insight. Get away from your screen and visit the shop. As a designer, your job is not only to design, it is to design to solve a problem. Problems can not be solved by sitting at a desk, but by being engrossed in the world. So if you are designing a new shoe, go to the old school shoe shop and see how people try out and buy shoes, to understand their psychology or mindset. One funny example is an airline that wanted to reduce its costs and the designer working on the project flew on their flights, finding out that the people did not eat as much food from the food tray as they were getting. So they reduced the size of the food tray, reducing the weight and costs and saving the airline a lot of money. Such insight through observation leads to optimization. Yet today, we do not let our designers have enough time to immerse themselves in the world.

Any advice for young minds who want to join the brand and design industry?

Do not copy-paste CV emails. Showcase yourself meaningfully and uniquely as a brand. Are you intellectually curious, hilarious, or have something unique to put forward? Understand things like analytics and how the metaverse is operated. Most companies have great courses online on how the world works in terms of platforms and media. If you are trying to break into this industry, find a mentor, not a company. Whom do you want to learn from? Build your application unique for them.

Is it immoral for a company to fail to deliver on its promise to its customers?

‘A brand is a promise, and a great brand is that promise kept.’ If a pizza brand said that it could deliver in a certain time frame and failed to do so, is that not damaging the brand’s reputation? We frame a strategy to become guardians of the brand. As a guardian, you frame a promise, without knowing anything beyond, can this brand live up to the promise? If yes, no problem, but if not, it is up to you to tune that promise so that it can be achieved. You either keep the promise or beat it.

Written by: Ananya Gupta and Jineet Shah