I believe in this very simple concept of balancing the three avatars of a brand. Its Consumer Avatar, its Employee Avatar and its Corporate Avatar. I call this perfectly balanced brand a Power Brand. Easier said than done.

My reasoning is simple. In this hyper-connected world, we live in, where P2P (Peer-to-Peer) communication is rife, we cannot prevent our various stakeholders communicating with each other, across all geographical and social boundaries.

Employees are speaking to consumers, potential employees are speaking to current ones, vendors are speaking to other vendors. In short, informal peer to peer conversations are exploding thanks to technology. So, brand marketeers need to ensure that the conversations are in synch and the same message is being transmitted, albeit with different flavors.

And this is only possible if we have an Integrated Marketing Communication Strategy where we leverage synergies across our communication and branding activities and surround the targeted stakeholders with our messaging.

The core of this strategy is the Brand OWE (One Word Equity).

What does the brand stand for? For example, Volvo owns Safety, Bosch Engineering Excellence.

The next step is to define the relevant stakeholders to be communicated with. Both internal and external. And finally build an arsenal of communication messages emanating from the OWE to suit the different audiences, media and market requirements that are being considered. A layer of analytics must be built into each program to measure the returns on every marketing rupee spent to maximize ROI and whether it is reaching the right audience.