Deepak Gulati on brand trust and sustainability

Deepak, a very warm welcome to Trailblazers. Now before we get into the topic, I wanted to conduct a small experiment. Deepak, do you trust me? That's a very tricky question. I think I hardly know you. So whatever I know of you, I do have some degree of trust, but I think I need to know you much more to be able to trust you. But also it depends on the context. So in today's context, I do trust you. Well yes, you sort of have to start an interview by trusting. But it's an interesting way to start it, isn't it? Because there's something very human about trust, isn't there? And can you, as a philosophical point, Deepak, what starts is a very human value. Can you even really translate it into a corporate environment? Excellent.

Excellent point and excellent question. I think corporate environment or brands, to me, have to be inspired by human relationships. Any brand relationship between a product or a corporate and a customer or a consumer is like a human relationship. So if we get inspired by human relationship to help and use that to help build brand relationships, I think we'll end up doing excellent, building excellent trust and building excellent brands. Okay, so it has a very human dimension. Now let's take your current business, Deepak, Bridgestone. It's got the time on its side, right? It's a 150-year-old business. It's in all kinds of, best known for tyres perhaps, but it's in mobility solutions. It's in golf balls. It's in earthquake solutions.

How do you imbue all of these product areas, Deepak, with this humanness? How do you create that human transaction? Okay, so when we look at our category, the core category is tyres. And we say that tyres carry lives. And we take this thought quite seriously at our corporation. In fact, if you would see that when you're in a vehicle, the only thing in the vehicle that touches the road is the tyre. So we have a huge responsibility in terms of, I mean, maintaining the trust with our customers and making sure they are safe, right? And hence, in our culture, we focus a lot on safety and then performance. So by building it as a part of culture, I think we are able to bring that into our brand and our products.

So I would say things or the elements, core elements we use for a trusting relationship is, first is say promises, made promises, kept to me. Any human relationship has to be trusted if you make promises and keep those promises. And same thing applies to brands. So our promise of safety and our promise of performance and quality has to be met. I mean, that's a given. And we have to make sure very robust manufacturing or quality assurance processes which we follow. And it's not just the process, it's the culture in the organisation to ensure that our products always deliver on that. When we make any performance claims, we have a very, very robust claim qualification process.

Basic objective is to make sure we claim what we can deliver and we deliver whatever we claim. OK, but T-Bak, staying on this safety critical item, right, you know, as you say, where the rubber hits the road, implicit in your business. I mean, you've made the point that it's a given. And in terms of creating trust around this safety critical item, is it such a given that you don't actually market it? I think safety is just one aspect. You don't buy a tyre if it's safe only. You will not buy it if it's not safe, but you will buy it because of some other attributes also. I mean, you assume it's safe, right? Yeah, I mean, that has to be there. But surprisingly, it's not always there true for all products and all brands, right?

So ensuring that the core need of safety is met, to be able to build a more differentiated brand and to deliver on other things. Like when you drive, you want a driving pleasure, you want comfort, you want a longer lasting tyre so that it's a great value. So you have many aspects. You want performance so that if you have a racing car or you want to do a cornering or you want to go to an all-terrain area, the tyre should perform. So tyre has to perform in many, many different conditions. So that's where the brand differentiation, brand performance comes into play beyond just being safe. OK, and then just, I mean, you know, so it's multifaceted, it's specification, it's safety record. But let's talk about when it goes wrong, Deepak, right?

Because the abstract idea of trust is fine when it's untested, as people were all fine until we're tested. Talk to us a bit about how you regain trust in an organisation like Bridgestone when something goes wrong. Sure. I think you've touched on a very, very important critical aspects of brand building and brand trust. And in a category like us, something going wrong could be fatal also. So depending upon what has gone wrong, our way to handle that would also differ. Thankfully, I haven't been through a situation where I've had to have a critical issue like loss of human life or anything like that. And maybe thanks to the quality of products we have, that hasn't happened.

But you do get customer complaints, you know, something goes wrong with the product. We have a way of measuring consumer satisfaction. We have a call-in centre where people can call in and complain or to our dealers. And that happens very often. So what we do is we take those complaints as an opportunity to get back and create a positive experience out of that whole episode, which can help build trust. But do you mean it as such? So the cynics out there will say, when people talk about recovering a drama or whatever, that it's just kind of cynical corporate speak for taking opportunity. But how do you mean it as such? How do you mean it? So if I tell a lie to my wife, I really have to recover, right? And I have to mean it.

How do you mean it in organisations? I think, again, many different people will have different approaches. But to me, these things are very long term. So if you have a clear long term consistent strategy of things like promises made, promises kept, consistency in your communication and in your approach, transparency about what you do, how do you approach things, your processes, etc. If you have those, a short term blip can be recovered and the situation handling will depend on the issue. But these consistent long term behaviours really help you regain the trust apart from handling that specific issue at that point of time. I see. So, I mean, this topic, Deepak, is way too long for the 10 minutes that we've just had.

But in essence, it's a very human thing, right? Absolutely. And it's a very long term thing because however good the brand, there'll be ups and downs. Deepak, thank you so much for your insights. We must get you back on the show again to get to the bottom of this. Thank you so much. My pleasure.