India Brand summit 2005:



Last weekend I went for a seminar, which promised to be one of the greatest seminars on branding in the city. Quiet frankly the list of the panelist in the invitation card was very impressive indeed and that made me ask my company to fork out a good Rs 6000/- for me to be able to attend it.

I happen to attend some seminars in the past and have some experiences in organizing some events too,probably those are the reasons why my critical eyes could not but notice the abysmal job of the organizer. Though they have selected one of the better places in the city (Taj Lands End) to host the event, the sitting arrangements were just shocking. If you are one of those, whose waist size is on the other side of 30 then God save you! Surely some part of you will be on your neighbor's lap. They expected more than 750 people to get a glimpse of the podium and speakers with two screens. I bait apart from the people in the first few rows others had no idea what the power point charts of the speaker features. The organizers though managed to fill the delegates kits with promotional materials of all sponsors; they forgot to put the very basic- a writing pad or even a pen for one to scribble. All that was there was an unsharpened pencil, probably left for hungry people to chew as less I talk about the food menu the better it is.

Now lets talk about the content. Well, with due respect to all speakers who are the industry stalwarts, in India what is really missing is SOFT SKILLS. Some speakers were busy talking and making their company’s marketing pitch where as some just thought of reading their charts from the screen with no connect with the audiences. But in all of that the only few whose session will actually give you something to take back are of Bhaskar Das's (Executive President Bennett, Coleman & Co) and Santosh Kanekar's( Director-Marketing, UDV) for their great inside on “Role of brands in wake of price wars”, Prashant Pandey's (Dy CEO, Radio Mirchi) and Shripad Nadkarni's (Marketgate Consulating) views on "Brain Tattoos Creating Unique brands that stick in your consumer mind". Over all the most captivating session was that of "The emergence of Indian sports & cinema heroes as brand marketing tools". All the speakers had a lot to share and they just kept the audience enthralling. Piyush Pandey(Group President Ogilvy & Mather) Sanjay Lal (MD & CEO Percept D'Mark), K .V Sridhar (National Creative Director Leo Burnett) actor Rahul Bose all kept the audiences curiosity intact. R. Balakrishnan(Creative Director, Lowe India) was fascinating and seems very well prepared for the next session on "Leveraging the brand to drive business results" but his counterpart from the same session was disappointing.

I am sure I will never feel like attending such seminars at least the ones organized by the same event manager but just felt like giving few piece of advice to them.

· Look for a different moderator Mr. Bhatia! Though you tried to give a lot of comic relief to the audience but honestly we deserve someone better.
· Please you are inviting corporate, don't waste their time with such bad arrangements.
· Please ask your speakers to talk about the subject and take their brand as an example not just using us for marketing their brands.