CEO, Vaishnavi Corporate Communications

Feels Devdarshan Chakraborty, CEO of Vaishnavi Corporate Communications. Chakraborty has over 15 years of industry experience in the field of PR, Advertising and Corporate Communication.

He has also worked in the advertising industry with agencies, one of them being O&M. He has experience across diverse industry categories ranging from consulting to telecom to FMCG.

Presently, he is managing a client list at Vaishnavi, which includes the Tata's, ITC Foods, VSNL, Himalyan Drug Co., and Channel [V].

See, when you talk to us, you are taking to the first integrated communications consulting company, and that's our USP. We offer services that are devised towards integrating the whole communications requirement of the clients. And the way we have differentiated our services, if you look at our business model we have not taken the beaten track. We are all about 360 degree communications.

When we go out to pitch the first thing that we tell a client is the fact that we offer you a complete solution. If there is a problem we don't say that the solution is PR, advertising or direct marketing. What we say is that you have a problem, we will analyze the problem. The most important thing in terms of solving the problem is the strategy. Strategy that points to the direction that you need to take.

PR can be the only solution in just some limited cases. And the cases mostly includes a company which already has an established corporate communication mechanism. Also, lets say we are talking about a consulting firm, now they are necessarily not allowed to go out and advertise. So, now here PR has to take on the additional role of awareness generation and market seeding as well. Usually awareness generation and market seeding are advertising domains but for such cases you need to use PR.

Also, secondly there are certain products and services where you need a third party perspective as well. Where the awareness needs to be much more in-depth and a lot more convincing needs to be done. There I think PR is the only tool.

Its already gone beyond that, it no longer is media relations. See, when you look at a corporate, the first question you need to ask is that why it wants to hire a communication firm. Suppose you look at a company in the consumer sector, and they are loosing market share to another private entrant who has come and stormed the market. Usually the other guy is not being able to match up with them, employees have lost faith in the company, employees have lost faith in themselves. First of all, you need to get your house in order, so we take on that role. And then you come out in the market and you actually see how you help your client. Then we see is there anything which is stopping them from moving ahead, is it a question of marketing, is it a question of funds, is it a question of state excise policies.
Probably we might also tell them that we would not go out and proactively communicate, all we will do is when media asks a question, we will just give out the necessary information that are required. So, it goes much beyond that, it goes into looking at the internals of the company, it goes looking at the networks the company has.

It doesn't competes. I am a firm believer that each area of communication complements with each other. There is no question of competing really, 'yes' there is a lot of overlap which starts happening. most of the times the forced overlaps don't work. Unless and until they are a part of a well thought out strategy it doesn't works. That's what we are harping upon, central to your problems will be the solution.

I feel we are the only agency who recommends tracking of the deliverables in terms of the tracking tool. But I would like to caution here that we don't work with preconceived notions that only PR will do the magic for you. We do this with one of the tools that we have developed its called the Navigator, that essentially plots where a brand a product or a corporate is, looks at what are the promises, looks at what are the values going to be. And also looks at what you ultimately need to do to communicate to the market.

While in advertising you will see, there are set parameters on the basis of which a successful ad campaign is measured, in PR we don't have such parameters. And it's the same in case of communications. Over a period of time, you might see specialists entering in this field, that can take some time but when that happens we can say the industry is moving towards some kind of maturation.