BrandNEW sets up shop in Gurgaon

The brand consultancy cum agency, which opened its shutter earlier this month, has been set up by ad and design veterans Indranil Gupta, Pranab Dutta and Aniruddha Roy.

Gurgaon-based BrandNEW is the new brand consultancy cum agency on the block. Set up by brand and design veterans Indranil Gupta, Pranab Dutta and Aniruddha Roy, the agency set shop earlier this month. It has already signed on a client, Kwality Group, which has a chain of restaurants such as Gaylord, Chopsticks, Bread & More, Angeethi and its flagship brand, Kwality (restaurant and catering services).

The three founding partners have a cumulative brand experience of 75 years and, as its brochure mentions, BrandNEW will help brands in positioning and propositioning. It will specialise in four areas - brand strategy conceptualisation including research, brand architecture building, internalisation and launch execution; creative messaging, identity design and manualisation, brand advertising and collateral development; digital strategy, design and online media implementation; and, publishing, environment branding and consumer experience management.

Indranil Gupta, founder-director and CEO, BrandNEW, says, "Viewing the India market from a global branding perspective, I was convinced there were sufficient opportunities to begin a branding consultancy that offered a strong, specialised strategic capability coupled with innovative creative solutions that could be taken through to final execution."

Considering there was a niche in new brand introductions that not many of the biggies were concentrating on, the trio felt entrepreneurs would be interested in having specialists to hand hold them to fashion new enterprise communications. "All three of us bring complementary skills to the table to provide what was required: ideas, structured thinking, design of elevated quality, relationship management and business experience with brands," Gupta adds.

Explaining the name, Gupta says BrandNEW synthesises 'brand' and 'new' in a familiar yet fresh context. "The two words are deliberately fused together. It works to capture how we want to be perennially perceived in an evergreen sort of way, and also the area of our endeavour: creating new brands or germinating brand-new ideas," he says.

The brand's logo has the an eye catching orange-yellow background on which the name is written in two fonts and colours - Brand is in black and NEW, which is in capitals, is in red.

Before this, Gupta was the CEO of Bahrain-based independent branding company, Vahid Associates Brand Futurists, and spent 13 years in West Asia. He's an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. His forte is in implementing business vision to relevant brand architecture and developing communication strategy. Gupta has worked with agencies such as BBDO, O&M, Lowe and JWT for two decades. During this period, he worked on brands such as Dettol Soap, Nokia, Adidas, Dabur, Vatika, India Today group, UNICEF, Woodland shoes and Credimax credit cards.

Dutta is the founder-director and chief creative officer of BrandNEW. He founded design studio Great Latitude in 2005 and has also worked as creative and design consultant for media companies. His design studio has a team of award-winning creative directors, photographers, editors, writers, musicians, artists, designers and architects. Dutta has also worked as creative director at Discovery Networks International and has been creative and design consultant with Buffalo Networks, Hindustan Times group, Outlook magazine and The Indian Express group. He began his career as art director with India Today magazine.

Aniruddha Roy has been a marketing and advertising professional for 28 years and comes with experience in integrated marketing, communications strategy, advertising development and brand management in the service industry. He began his career with Contract and moved on to Clarion and IB&W. He also headed marketing in ITC Travel House, Bharti BT and Syntel. He also headed relationship marketing agency Kankei.