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Positioning and identification of a company, its products and its services are becoming more important for survival in highly competitive Indian and global markets. Familiarity with a brand name influences consumer's to buy the product without risk of malfunctioning and it is a brand that creates a bond between customers, products and organisations.
Brands became synonyms for the products - Colgate for toothpaste, Amrutanjan for pain balm and Titan for watch.

The life cycle of the branding starts with its definition and then progress through four different customer experiences as shown below: -

1. The Awareness Experience
2. The Buying Experience
3. The Using and Service Experience
4. The Membership Experience

Three Pointers to Evaluate Indian Brands' Sustainability

A successful brand is a bond between the product and the consumer. This bond is made with several links and each link is an assurance given to the customer that her needs, specifications will be met without compromising for the quality and served at a reasonable price. Also, these customer's needs should be fulfilled not only once, but continuously - and at any instance of time, if the brand fails to meet the customer's expectations, or if it fails to attract the customer, then the 'link' is broken. Now the question is - How to reinforce the 'links' time to time? We have emphasized on the three links that are very important in deciding the concept of sustainability - product quality, value for money and product availability.

The first link is 'quality'. No product or a brand or a service survives long if its quality does not equal or exceed what the buyer expects. For example, If Godrej, Dabur are the ever-lasting brands, it is because of their commitment to uncompromised quality.

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* Contributed by -
Kishore Kotturu & Johnson Quadros,
Students of Class of 2007,
Post Graduate Programme (PGP) in Management,
ISB, Hyderabad.