The brand nobody could copy

I never had the biggest marketing budget, so I had to out-think it. I put Su-Kam’s name on service vans first — because a brand that shows up to fix your inverter earns more trust than any billboard. Then one advertisement broke the box the market had put us in: we were “the small-inverter company,” and that single campaign changed how customers and dealers saw us overnight. Branding, I slowly realised, was my real strength — I knew it only when I watched everyone, small companies and giants alike, copy my ideas.

I made sure Su-Kam was seen wherever Indians travelled. My secretary Chetna and I reviewed board installations every week from my office, and we covered the famous pilgrimage sites of the North, South, East, West and North-East with Su-Kam boards. I refused to let the word “inverter” sit next to the name — the brand had to stand on its own. On the road to Jaipur I once stopped at a dhaba with wonderful food and a badly painted sign, so I had my team design him a proper board, his name written correctly, under our brand — and soon dhabas across India wore Su-Kam boards. In Srinagar I saw the Shikaras on Dal Lake in tattered shape and re-covered every one of them in Su-Kam, years before Airtel and others discovered the same idea. Every dealer meet, every hotel we booked, was wrapped in the brand until anyone walking in knew something big was happening.

And here is an idea I am quietly proud of — all of it done before 2010, before anyone called it “brand on wheels.” I wrapped our own employee buses head to toe in Su-Kam. Every morning my people rode to work inside a moving billboard, and entire cities watched it pass. I sent demo vans like the “Power Gone… Still Masti On!” truck through the streets to put the product in front of people, and I carried the very same idea abroad — Su-Kam buses ran fully branded through the roads of Yangon, in Myanmar. I watched, quietly amused, as one corporate after another began branding their staff buses exactly the way we had. They always follow.

And I made the customer part of the show. We ran consumer campaigns nobody in our category dared to attempt — “Su-Kam Lao, Mercedes Chalao,” a scratch-and-win with five crore rupees in prizes, a Mercedes and cars to be won simply for buying an inverter or a battery. I put Su-Kam umbrellas over the juice-carts and roadside thelas on a thousand street corners, so the brand sheltered the smallest vendor in the smallest town. Marketing, to me, was never about the size of the budget — it was about being everywhere a person’s eye could fall, and being impossible to forget.

“I didn’t have the deepest pockets, so I had to have the sharpest ideas. Branding was the one thing nobody could out-spend me on — they could only copy me.”