In general, everyone thinks they know branding and investing. But in reality, branding wisdom is indeed very rare. The largest consumer companies in the world have a success rate of less than 10%. Which means that out of 100 brands that they launch, just 5 or 6 succeed. And it is indeed rare that a brand becomes a proxy for the product. Like Godrej is for an almirah. Or JCB is for an earth excavator.
Recently I was driving to a meeting near Jaipur, when I saw a road sign indicating “IIT Jaipur”. To the best of my knowledge the IIT in Rajasthan was located in Jodhpur and not in Jaipur. I followed the road signs and the next one said “LNM IIT Jaipur”. This intrigued me further. I was also told that this was a govt IIT. I decided to pay a visit to the IIT – as a classic cold call. The college was welcoming to my white hair and promptly the PRO was showing me around. It was indeed an impressive campus – spread over 100 acres near a lake with a rather imposing “Centre for AI Technology” under construction. This was the LN Mittal Institute of Information technology set up with the state govt as a partner under the ppp mode.
But I was looking at a larger question. And that of strengthening brand IIT as an Indian entry into the global league of super institutes. Korea has Kites and China has C9. But nothing comes even remotely close to brand IIT. LNM IIT came across as an outstanding institute, but it is not an IIT. So how do the original IITs stand out.
There are many version of IIT. There is PanIIT which is an alumni event hosting society, there is C-IIT which is a consortium of IITs for river rejuvenation. There is a TanIIT and even a PanIIT Reach for India which trains drivers and blue collar workers (and does an outstanding job of it I believe). There are many other flavours of organisations which have some version of IIT in their name. My alma mater has a IITBombay Alumni Association constituted as a non profit company. And there is even a PanIIT Institute which is India’s answer to the Fraunhofer Institute of Germany and addresses all the 64 advanced critical technologies that now methodically constitute what we refer to as the frontier technologies.
It is now upto the Global Branding Council of IIT Alumni Council to figure out how to clean brand IIT and separate the IIT brand from the LNM IIT or Pan IIT or Tan IIT or C-IIT.
When you dive into it, branding is no less complicated than deep tech. Thoughts welcome on refreshing and strengthening brand IIT.