Building a winning brand portfolio @ GCC's-India

A very interesting topic about GCC's/GIC's or Captives in India Is-What's next?

India IT services organizations are transforming at a pace which has never been seen before. Considering the Geopolitical scenarios and change in lens of how Global conglomerate looks at its GCC, IT services is seemed to be taking a right turn. This right turn corners a very interesting shift of 'Brand positioning'.

While IT Brand managers are building a winning brand portfolio & creating a brand architecture for GCCs specifically, which can be uniquely and individually distinctive to cater to GCCs and combines with the parent group brand to build a collectively powerful portfolio.

The House of brands

In most of the IT organizations, Global services & Regional services arms need to cannibalize their strategy together to build sustainable business. In the house of brands, the two operate as individual entities, and work in parallel to each other to grow the business.

The headquarter unit, sitting next to the global leadership drives global transformation programs and large offshore multiyear contracts, and the regional GCC unit, enables the GCC arm of the conglomerate right from Internal IT operations & majorly the infrastructure and applications support. The outsourcing in GCCs is majorly done in FTE model or capacity-based model, where program or project is managed by GCC management over the vendor managed services. Both the brands (units within the same parent company), uniquely cater to respective customer geo's & stakeholders to cover the market thoroughly, and uniquely focuses and bring differentiated value propositions.

As both entities operates on standalone financials, they have the freedom to invest individually for future businesses and growth, right from creating technology COEs to creating a forecasted talent pool to delivery efficiently. In house of brands, each unit customizes their services as per local needs, bring a major 'Supply side effectiveness'.

A house of brands is portfolio of possibilities, offering consumers a variety of choices that cater to their unique preferences. A good reflection on one brand compliments the other. This strategy is most common in large conglomerates, mostly global IT organizations, where scale of business is optimally large to manage individually and portfolio as a whole has appetite and capabilities to serve bigger initiatives.

The Branded House

The Brand house is a beacon of trust, where customers recognize the brand's promise in every engagement. In growing IT organizations where operations are in mid or small scale, the branded house strategy works best. Even large IT organizations, which has got a significant revenue stream from a single business, strictly practice the branded house to sail smooth.

While GCCs do prefer to engage locally, the brand house strategy gives them a direct access to the local support to engage suppliers. Control on IT operations is through single channel, which sometimes creates slowness but is balanced by the Demand side effectiveness which is enriched here.

More is better, less is more.

The evolution of GCC industry in India depends on various factors, including economic conditions, technology trends, business strategies and government policies, but two main aspects of future of GCCs in India are Industry specific expertise & customer centric approach.Both the factors are directly linked to brand positioning of IT organizations, and brand managers while crafting their next @ GCCs, will have to clearly bring out a unique brand which aims to fulfill the KRA of GCCs and most importantly to help build a sustainable & efficient business. Thanks, Utkarsh sinha