Out-Bransoning Branson: How Baba Ramdev Built A Uniquely Elastic Brand With Patanjali
There Are Fascinating Similarities Between The Patanjali Brand And The Virgin Brand.
Dec 10, 2016
Richard Branson is, of course, admired by marketing professionals for the Virgin brand he has created – often listed among the world’s great brand success stories. Starting as a tiny music label, Virgin has gone on to become a highly innovative “Challenger Brand”, unnerving dominant brand leaders in various categories, from British Airways to Coke and Pepsi.
What is remarkable about Virgin is the way it successfully overturned one of the fundamental precepts of marketing – that a brand can succeed only in a narrowly defined space (and the narrower the better). For example, Colgate has a compelling brand equity in the toothpaste space. And Ponds has a compelling brand equity in the skincare space. But you couldn’t have a Colgate moisturizing cream. Or a Ponds toothpaste. It just does not work that way in the consumer’s mind (Ponds actually did try to launch a toothpaste once, but it failed miserably.)
Virgin, however, managed to create a brand equity that was uniquely elastic, based on the core values of consumer empathy and cheeky irreverence. And it thus managed to enter – and disrupt – an unprecedented variety of categories, from finance to cellular services, from travel to healthcare. The key driver of this uniquely elastic Virgin brand, uniting its diverse product stories, was the flamboyant, maverick personality of Richard Branson, and his knack for generating enormous amounts of publicity for himself and his causes.
As a result of what it has managed to achieve, the Virgin case study is a regular fixture wherever brands are discussed – along with other leading-edge brands like Apple, Airbnb, Uber and Red Bull.
But now it looks like Baba Ramdev has, entirely independently, discovered Richard Branson’s route, and out-Virgined Virgin, across a mind-boggling range of 500 product lines, from toothpastes to noodles, from home cleaners to candy bars.
It won’t be long, perhaps, before marketing professionals all over the world are studying how Baba Ramdev and Patanjali managed to upset the apple carts of multi-national giants like Colgate-Palmolive, Nestle, Hindustan Unilever and Procter & Gamble (not to mention other leading players like Dabur, Marico, Britannia and Emami).
