William Shakespeare is a great bard but would have made a poor marketer. He got it all wrong when he said in Romeo and Juliet ‘A rose by any other name would smell as sweet’. It was to infer that the names of things do not affect what they really are.

Untrue!

In marketing, a name when it becomes a brand is everything. The difference between a name and a brand is that the name doesn’t have any associations. It’s just that – a name. Brand is a blinker. Once the marketer puts it on the customers, they can see the brand only one way – the way the marketer has fashioned it.

Staying on the subject of litterateurs, does the name Richard Galbraith ring a bell? He is the author of a crime novel ‘The cuckoo’s calling’. It debuted in Amazon in 2013. How was the book?

Who knows? Other than the 1,500 buyers who had bought it, no one else knew about it. Did you, till you read it here?

It was languishing at number 4,079 on the bestseller list. And then something happened. Or, someone happened. A someone who found out that Richard Galbraith was actually a pseudonym for a lady called J.K. Rowling. The Harry Porter author had masked her name to ensure people read her book without being biased by her stardom.

Were people biased? I don’t know. You tell me. Once people knew who Richard Galbraith actually was, there was an Armageddon to Amazon. The cuckoo’s calling went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies and became the best-selling book in Amazon. Rowling became Galbraith and sold a mere 1,500. When Galbraith became Rowling, her book became Number One!

If the story doesn’t convince you about the power of a brand, here’s some music to your ears. Literally! Joshua Bell, the renowned violinist, once performed in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hundreds paid in thousands to witness one of the world’s finest exponents of the violin. There was hardly a space left in the hall to drop a face mask.

The next day a casually-dressed Joshua stood outside the subway station, took his famed $3.5 million Stradivarius violin, left the case open for tips and started playing. His electrifying performance was lost on the thousands who passed by without bothering to acknowledge, far less hear the mesmerizing music of a master. The reason is obvious. Joshua was not Joshua outside the subway station.

A rose by any other name isn’t sweet, Mr. Shakespeare!