No compromise on integrity

After an unexpected brush with brand as a subject while preparing for a job interview as group marketing manager for Davis & Shirtliff Group in 2002, Tom Sitati got hooked.

He couldn’t put the books down. He kept going, long after he had clinched the job, and soon he found himself forming a think tank on the subject.

In 2006, he started preaching branding to all who cared to listen, and that was the precursor to setting up Brand Integrated Consulting, the strategic advisory firm he runs today in Nairobi together with two partners.

The company delivers strategic branding to other companies, the job being to turn around organisations from blandness to successful ones in all form and shapes. This may involve name creation, brand strategy, logo design, product strategy, and product design as well as brand internalisation for all staff.

Sitati has two books on the topic. He also contributes articles to magazines and newspapers. His passion for branding appears cemented.

Thanks to all the efforts, in November this year, he won the Africa Brand Leadership Award for 2013 during the Brand Leadership Awards convened by the India-Africa Summit in Mauritius.

But what exactly is this brand thing he is so much into?

Mr Sitati explains through what his firm does — crafting brands and helping clients to clearly outline how they want to be perceived by the market so that they are attractive, not just from their outlook but also from their culture.

“A brand strategy is not just about communication. It’s about the whole organisation. For instance, if your objective is for your brand to be about speed and sufficiency, everybody has to be speedy and efficient. It cuts right across the entire organisation, meaning that you have to help it change their processes, systems and behaviour in order to exhibit the desired image towards clients,” says Sitati.

Because the approach is holistic to ensure the solutions impact on the organisational goals, it involves in-depth research to understand the brand and business.

Brand consultants thus, have to conduct an organisational audit to determine the prevailing situation. This goes deeper than just looking at how their marketing is doing.

Sometimes it is necessary to work with consultants with expertise in specific fields, ranging from financial, HR, management and so on.

This is important because a brand consultant has to understand the whole organisation to clarify its positioning and work out a strategy for the new brand.

Given this, integrity is key to what a brand consultant does. In the process of their work, brand consultants get access to the deepest secrets of the client organisation to be able to create credible brands. 

“Confidentiality is extremely important because people tell you where they want to go. If such information got in the wrong hands, it could bring down the entire organisation. Integrity encompasses all other virtues that must go with the job,” says Sitati.

Brand consultants don’t just suggest what the client needs to do, but rather design the brand along with an accompanying manual to ensure execution is consistent across all applications.

“We audit to understand. After that we work on development of the strategy of the brand. Then it has to be implemented and measured to ensure that it actually works,” Sitati explains.

Brands, he continues, are about capturing people’s hearts and minds. And to do that, you need to be creative and imaginative. Most importantly, you must be practical.

People must connect with the brand. For that to happen, you have to understand their social make up. If you don’t, you might have a brilliant product but people will just look at it.

You must also understand people in a very deep way. You need to know their motivation for the way they behave and buy, and link that to what the client sells. That is the only way you are able to produce something that people will connect to.

To serve diverse customers effectively as a brand adviser, you must also be well rounded in terms of your world view and be open-minded and inquisitive to understand what is happening behind the scenes.

So, what does one study?

In addition to his degree in architecture, Sitati has a diploma in marketing from the Marketing Society of Kenya and a Masters degree in New Media and Society from the University of Leicester (UK).

If you want to join his field, he advises, you have no option than to embrace new media because that is where the world in headed.

The only hurdle would be that there are not institutions to cover the course in its entirety.     

And you shouldn’t worry if you are already in a different career trajectory. Sitati believes it might have helped that he was a mixed bag of backgrounds, having studied and gained experience in both architecture and marketing.

“A lot of what I know (about brand) is actually self-taught. It is not as regimented as your regular professions like medicine or law,” says the brand expert, who sits on the Global Advisory Board of the World Brand Congress.

Sitati sees brand strategy becoming a way of life in the not-so-distant future as more people understand what they are doing. In short, there is potential for growth here. And the returns, he admits, are handsome.