Your company does not have a brand problem. It has a vocabulary problem.

I have sat in the same meeting maybe forty times.

Someone senior says the company needs to build its brand. Everyone nods. Then, within about ninety seconds, the conversation is about hoardings, brand-ambassadors, advertisements, etc. How many, where, for how long, at what rate. By the end of the hour a rough budget has been drawn and even pushed for approval and nobody has even said a single thing about the brand.

This is not stupidity. I believe that it is the vocabulary. We use four words as though they are one word. Brand, marketing, advertising, communication. Only one of them has a rate card, so the meeting drifts toward that one thing every time. That’s the only thing that can be measured: advertising.

I want to separate the four. Not because definitions are fun, but because a manager who cannot name what he is buying will buy the thing with the invoice attached, can be measured easily and scores high on the KPIs and report it as brand building.

Start with a test you can try when you visit your local mart. Just observe your behavior.

We see two similar products sitting next to each other, something common like packets of rice, soaps, toothpaste, even deodorants. Same shelf, same size, same function, same day. One costs more. We and many others, still tend to pick up the more expensive one, and most of the time we do it involuntarily, without any visible pain.  

That gap, in rupees, is the brand. Not the logo. Not the campaign. The gap. 

Everything else falls into place around that.

Marketing is a set of decisions. What you make, who you make it for, what you charge, where a person can buy it. Kotler wrote this down as four Ps, some sixty years ago and the useful part was never the alliteration. It was that all four are decisions somebody signs. Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Three of the four have nothing to do with talking.

Advertising is a paid space. Hoardings, airtime, print cc, social media posts, sponsored posts, boosting, etc. It is a line item. It is the only one of the four that comes with a receipt, which is exactly why it eats the meeting.

Communication is everything your organisation emits, paid or not. You hold the music. The uniform on your delivery rider. How long a customer stands at your counter. The terms and conditions you set in the fine print because you hoped nobody would bother reading them. You cannot switch communication off. You can only decide whether anyone is steering it.

Brand is what stays in a customer's head when none of the above is in front of her. Marty Neumeier said it in one line. A brand is not what you say it is, it is what they say it is. 

It lives in someone else's memory, which means you do not own it, which is uncomfortable, which is why most people prefer to talk about hoardings. In simple words, you, as a part of the organisation’s workforce, do not build the brand, you co-build it with your numerous customers, media, critics, to name a few. You can only create the product and its advertisement, hence the focus.

The practical consequence is simple. You can buy advertising this quarter. You cannot buy a memory this quarter.

Each of the four is measurable, and this is where Nepali practice thins out. Advertising you measure with spend, reach, cost per thousand, all of it sitting in invoices you already have. Marketing you measure with penetration, distribution, share. Communication you measure by audit, and the crudest version works. Pick ten touchpoints, from your website to your invoice to your front desk, and count the contradictions. Most companies stop counting at four or five.

Brand you measure with price premium against the category median, and with unaided recall. Say the category, count who names you first. That needs a survey, a survey needs a budget line, and nobody has approved that budget line, so the one number that describes the asset goes unmeasured year after year.

Go look at an instant noodle shelf in Kathmandu. Count the brands. You will get well past ten before you finish the row, and the price spread from the cheapest pack to the dearest is not small.

That spread is not a manufacturing story. The raw materials: wheat, oil, seasonings, are broadly the same. The distribution is broadly the same. Some of these packs come out of comparable plants with comparable inputs. What differs is what the buyer believed before one walked in.

Wai Wai is not winning that shelf on flavour chemistry. It arrived early, it went everywhere, and it turned into the word Nepali children use when they mean noodles. That is a memory structure, built over decades, and no competitor can purchase it at any price.

The accountants worked this out before the marketers did. The Ocean Tomo study of intangible asset market value found that intangibles made up roughly 17% of the market value of S&P 500 companies in 1975 and around 90% by 2020. Brands, patents, data and relationships sit on that side. Plants and machinery sit on the other. Global investors repriced the two of them a generation ago. Most boards in Kathmandu have not.

Now let me argue against myself, because the clean separation I just drew is weaker than it looks.

Byron Sharp's research makes the case that buying is driven by mental availability and physical availability working together, and that pulling the two apart in the field is genuinely hard. A brand on every shelf gets remembered more because it is on every shelf. Being remembered then drives the next purchase. The arrow runs both ways and I cannot cleanly cut it.

So when a Nepali manager tells you their brand is strong, they may be describing forty years of trucks reaching shops in remote villages and towns that nobody else can reach. That their distribution channel is deep. That is a real asset and a formidable one. It is just not the asset they think they are describing. The moves that defend distribution are not the moves that defend memory, and a company that confuses the two will spend against the wrong threat.

Two things I could not verify while writing this. Comparable input costs across Nepali noodle producers are not public, so my claim that the wheat and the process are similar rests on category norms rather than audited numbers. Let's treat it as an assumption. And the price spread on the shelf changes by store and by week, so check your own shelf rather than trusting mine.

Which leaves the question I actually want answered.

How much of the leading Nepali FMCG brands' market share is mental availability, and how much is physical availability that no challenger could afford to replicate?

I am yet to stumble upon the two data where these two have been separated: mental and physical availability.

So here is the question I would put to anyone building a consumer brand in Nepal: when you look at your market share, how much of it comes from being easy to find, and how much comes from being easy to remember? And if your competitor suddenly matched your distribution tomorrow, what would remain in the customer's mind?