BalaKumaran, Founder, BrandStory

With the advent of technological innovations and social forums, Brands have evolved to be firm believers of being present online and drive engagement with their audience. Perceiving this change in consumer’s expectations, Bala Kumaran founded BrandStory, a digital marketing agency in 2014. Treading on a strong belief on how brands could communicate effectively from the perspective of a brand head, he states, “I realized that my digital partners were technologists and not strategists with business understanding. While I worked with leading leading retail firms as brand head in Dubai, as a post graduate from NIFT, I carried with myself a strong sense of belief that BrandStory could be a platform where we could help give clients a far better outreach of the brand’s personality in itself.”

BrandStory has been aiding enterprises and brands in creating successful stories with its flagship services in various sectors including healthcare, education, retail, on-demand, beauty and wellness, business consulting, FMCG, infrastructure, logistics, manufacturing, software and mobility. Offering design focused digital transformation; the services encompass Branding & Identity, Social Media, SEO, Web and App design and building services.

“Every brand looks forward to a team that can be good in execution. The DNA of BrandStory is to hustle our way out. An agency by definition, cannot be well versed right from mobility to beauty, but the key to our sustenance with almost 90 percent client retention rate is that we are fast learners and adaptors,” elucidates Bala Kumaran.

50 percent of BrandStory’s customers are traditional business owners who are now in the adapting stage of this digital boom marks Kumaran. The rest of the firm is contributed by well informed SME’s and funded startups who know what digital empowerment means to their brands. Two years ago, he recalls the uncertainty to sell digital medium as a point of engagement and sale, when the market was not as matured as the UAE’s which then had over 83 percent of internet penetration creating a sense of urgency for every brand owner to be present online. Whereas back here, digital was still the game of big e-commerce players and big brands let alone;

BrandStory offers services at varying price ranges and always keeps its clients informed on the strategy, implementation modules and digital spend to help them gradually adapt to digital space with ease and confidence.

 With the recent boom of digital marketing requirements, the founder asserts that “I recently came across a stat that marks the average number of engagement years between brands and agencies to have become 3 years dipping from 8 years over the last 5-6 years time. At BrandStory we have loved art, logic, and numbers. Thanks to our previous retail experience to churn a large amount of data and point out to problem areas and then define solutions for them. Our USP is that we understand business objectives and chart out workable and attainable long and short term strategies over concentrating on trivial day to day scope.”

BrandStory supports upcoming start ups, SME’s who are striving to grow faster and enterprises that need a spin to keep evolving and adapting. With its systematic approach to conceive brand personality, the company has served valuable clients including Adayar Anand Bhavan (A2B restaurants), New Horizon Group of Institutions, International Centre of Culinary Arts (ICCA), Fatafeat Online, BHiVE Workspace, Value Pro International, Angadi Silks, Servize Pro, ATOP Communications, Vymo, Gympac fitness and TRUGlobal to name a few.

BrandStory envisions the requirement of online reputation management and seamless platforms for digital advertisements at lower costs and custom made for Indian markets as the next big requirement for brands in India. “We are stepping up the game for 2017, by launching our programmatic buying platform to take in charge of 360^O ad solutions for our clients from one portal hence defying the standard way of how digital marketers work.” points out Bala on his future expansion plans.

On BrandStory’s focus and belief system, he marks, “We believe in working with clients who share the thought process of expecting a steady growth and consistency in their digital journey amongst the overwhelming digital clutter. Most of the time we are very cautious about our clients spend and propose plans only if the research number supports. We are a team of 14+ people for design and technology working cohesive to provide our clients a complete digital solution experience. Our forte is Design, Digital (Web, Mobility, UI/UX), ORM, SEO and Social media Management.