The Emotional Surplus Strategy sums up Shining’s delivery. Emotion is the most important capital for the human race; it is what remains after people pass away. A company that delivers, in consistent and sustainable ways, the rational, functional and emotional benefit to consumers, will perpetuate itself forever.
Christian Koffmann,
Former Worldwide Chairman of Johnson & Johnson Consumer & Personal Care Group, USA. Previously Managing Director of Gervais Danone France. Started his career in Procter & Gamble
When I met Sen (this is how we address him in France) for the first time in Paris some 25 years ago when Shining started working for Danone, I could already sense that his business philosophy was more profound, his branding
had this Emotional Surplus necessary to cap the rational and functional benefits of the products we were working
on together.
I’m impressed to see that Sen’s thinking has evolved to this strong concept of fil conducteur that enables a corporation to achieve two key objectives: provide coherence and consistency to all the segments of the organization; and furthermore, to build brands for securing the three - Rational Surplus, Functional Surplus and Emotional Surplus in the long run.
Herve Courtaigne,
Chairman, Horosmart. Former Managing Director & CEO of Proteg, France
When my partners and myself started a Europe-wide time management software company through the acquisition
of ten different companies from various countries, Shining again gave us high value service to create one focused corporation called Horosmart.
It brought the necessary consistency to federate ten different companies and did help define a very unique positioning that proved useful to build our further development.
Azim H Premji,
Chairman, Wipro
We are extremely happy to work with Shining, who provided us invaluable consultancy services in our exercise of repositioning the corporate identity and re-articulating our corporate values. Within two years of using the new
Wipro identity and articulating our corporate values to the customer, we have increased our salience in the market. We have received ‘High Quoted Values’ as promised by Shining.
Keshub Mahindra,
Chairman, Mahindra & Mahindra
Has been working with us for the last 6 years through innovative ideas, through his passion for thoroughness, his direction towards customer centricity. All those things add up to help a brand in the market.
Dr. Sridhar Mitta,
Managing Director, E4E India. Formerly President Global R&D and Chief Technology Officer, Wipro Technologies
Shining’s core contribution to its customer is its ability to conduct research on the markets and get into the minds of the consumers to know their behaviour, both stated and unstated. From that analysis they draw conclusions specific to a given market and products so that it helps a company create the right product and the right service which demands attention from the customer base. This research is what leads to giving a differentiating factor to various companies and hence their ability to command a higher price.
Harsh Mariwala,
Chairman & MD, Marico Limited
In 1995-96, we engaged Shombit for a first study on Parachute brand, and subsequently for Saffola. Let me give you an idea what
he did for the brands. At that time Parachute was doing a turnover in the range of Rs. 150-200 crores. Today if you combine all the parachute extensions, the turnover is more than Rs. 700 crores. So the brand has really become strong and I must give credit for building the foundation of the brand to Shombit. Similarly, Saffola was a small brand then, but today its turnover is more that Rs. 450 crores.
Vineet Agrawal,
President, Wipro Consumer Care & Lighting
In Wipro we perhaps have never done such a very elaborate research before or even after Shining. It was on what values of the organization we can have, what identities we can have and what is the perceived and potential of the organization. Our identity was launched in 1998 and in the years since Wipro has practically become a household name. Wipro stocks went up very well. The identity and values got communicated very well. One fundamental
change we did was to get ourselves aligned to the customer, keeping the customer upfront and have our values around the customer.
N.C.Venugopal,
CEO & Managing Director, Nilgiri’s Retail
We were going to expand from our 32-strength retail chain to 500 stores in the South. What is special with the Shining team is that they did a perception and potential analysis, visited our stores, interviewed customers, captured the essence of their nature, attitude, behaviour, purchase patterns and held group discussions and debates involving our team within, as well as other people of various profiles. Using this input and their experience from studying this pattern in other countries, they put together and evolved new store designs, new look branding for our stores including the facade, new look display cabinets, new merchandising formats including a bakery to leverage our core strengths and bring in customers to buy high margin products.
It has been a pleasure and a bit of revelation working with Shining. Shining has given valuable insights on how customers perceive us. Coming from a completely fresh perspective, these insights will go a long way in re-orienting ourselves towards a customer-surprising culture. By implementing the unique process they are leading us through,
we hope to transform the internal and external face of M&M in the years to come.
Vineet Taneja,
Business Director, Multimedia, Nokia India. Formerly Vice President, Tea, HUL
Over the years, different people have worked on Brooke Bond and it had almost lost its identity. It was very
interesting that Shining’s proposal talked about the core of the brand in terms of its functionality and rationality. Hindustan Unilever has very standard procedures on how to go to the consumer.
Shining questioned them and came out with innovative solutions to get the real picture from the consumer. Shining strongly believes that Indian consumers like, and are used to, crowds. Having about 15 consumers together makes them comfortable and come out with the truth inside, rather than having a focus group of 5-6 consumers trying to portray a picture that is not really the reality.
We arrived at the final solution, “Brooke Bond Cheers your Senses.” Once the thought was clear, this was transferred into the brand identity, which we are now using very, very successfully.
Shyam Bhartia,
Chairman, Jubilant Group
In a world where product differentiation is minimal and brands are getting commoditised, Shining’s concept of Emotional Surplus can be effectively used for the customer to keep coming back to you. An Emotional Surplus
identity helps you achieve higher value for the product.
Gautam Nagwekar,
CEO, M&M Farm Equipment Sector
RFE, ReFinE Ladder means that every brand needs to have a Rational element, a Functional element and an Emotional element.
That Emotional element, when founded on a base of very strong Rational and Functional elements, goes to create Emotional Surplus for the consumer. And Emotional Surplus is the way to create long term customer loyalty for the brand.
Guy Goves,
Chief Executive Officer, Khet-Se Agriproduce India Private Limited, A Joint Venture Company of
Tata Chemicals Limited and Total Produce, Ireland
You and your company Shining were an integral part of creating an outstanding Corporate brand identity for our company Khet-Se.
I would like to put down a few areas where I felt you and your team made an impact:
Strategic input: Shining Consulting was able to look at the complete value chain through the use of its framework EMOD. This provided us an excellent basis for developing our value proposition. Their strategic thinking capabilities were reflected in the framing of Khet-Se’s delivery promise and how the promise should be brought to life in the context of our business. The focus was on having a meaningful differentiation for a new brand.
Creative input: The creative talent of Shining was visible in the way they crafted our brand identity, such that each element of
the identity had a powerful meaning and role to play in delivering the message to various stakeholders.
Execution: Shining worked with us on different manifestations of the proposed brand identity so that a coherent image was created for Khet-Se across all point of contact. Even though we were located in 2 cities we worked seamlessly with their consultants.
Pro-activeness: In terms of follow-up to ensure that activities area achieved timely, the team at Shining was
always extremely provocative and met the timelines on schedule.
Rajesh Jejurikar,
Chief of Operations, Mahindra Auto Sector
Marico experience: My association with Shining started in 1997 when I was in Marico dealing with Parachute
brand, which was selling more than a crore packs a month. But Parachute was beginning to be seen as a brand for the old and rural. What Shining brought to the table was really a very deep understanding of customers with a technique call P&P Research. Shombit and
I went to the smallest of towns. We either stood outside of shops or in groups which Shombit himself conducted to capture the
latent and hidden desires of customers. With that we
re-launched Parachute and created newer extensions. Parachute continues
to be dominant in hair care today and
has got into some very, very successful brand extensions.
Mahindra experience: What came out from Shining’s first audit round was that we need a fundamental change in the way we do
our business, develop our products, and the services we provide our customers. How can we make the organization more customer driven? Shining helped us create teams, bringing R&D, Manufacturing, Sales, Marketing into workshops, to understand the markets better and capture spiraling trends in different categories and how they influence the auto market. The whole concept was creating bio designs so that customers feel ergonomically rewarded.
The culture change Shining brought was creating AutoPassion within the company. Our HR team is now working on this key part of our change agenda, which is creating employees who are excited and passionate about automobiles, and in getting the organization to be more customer driven than we were earlier.
Gunender Kapur,
President & CEO at Reliance Retail Previously Executive Director, Foods, Hindustan Lever
I have been engaged with Shining for almost more than a decade now. I started working with Shining and Shombit in my Hindustan Lever days where we were putting together our entire strategy and brand plans for the foods business. Starting from there I have had a very long and enjoyable relationship with Shombit and his company Shining.
I have always relied on Shombit to bounce my thought process on something he is very passionate about, which is creating relevant consumer differentiation in the market place. What keeps our engagement going more than anything else probably two things. One, Shombit is passionate about everything he does. He is very genuine about anything he does. In every project that we have done together he has been as passionate as I have been or probably been even more. That makes it a more useful and fruitful relationship. The second thing which has kept our engagement going is our shared passion about creating differentiation in the market place
which is extremely relevant and compelling for the consumer. While that has been everyone’s ambition and certainly mine in
whatever we do.
Shombit & Shining bring ideas to the table; both visual, strategic, tactical, merchandising which can bring about relevant differentiation in the market. And therefore while it has been from our side our intent to create relevant differentiation, I think Shombit actually converts that intent and objective into brand ideas, mixes, packaging execution
in the market place.
It always amazes me that he is so lateral at coming with these ideas and making connections all the time, with everything which is happening in our country, in our economy, in our society in our consumers. Making fresh connections all the time which are strategically very right but yet in terms of their execution very fresh and very natural. And it is
this process which I enjoy the most. It is for this reason I have a lot of respect for what the company does. I have actually looked forward for a long and very fruitful association in the future as well.
On Retailing: Shining has also been engaged in private label brand at Reliance right from its inception. Private label agenda has been extremely important part of our game plan because it is our ambition to develop the categories that we sell. It is our ambition to develop consumers from goods, commoditized and unbranded products into buy and
save hygienic and high quality branded products. Shombit has been engaged with us right from the beginning of that journey and helped us create very relevant and differentiated propositions and brands, which are now helping us in this objective of upgrading consumers and indeed developing superior mixes which are out there in the market in a variety of categories starting from dairy to staples to processed food across the entire range of categories that we are engaged with.
“We learned a lot on the Indian Consumer Behavior. Actually the group was blown away, as other ‘straight-laced’ executives we visit just share their numbers with us, occasionally discuss CSR and talent management, but NOBODY discusses ‘emotions’ like Shining did. The professors really hadn’t expected this behavioral science at all.
“I know everyone liked seeing the overall differences in behaviour in different age groups in India as reflected in Shining’s video clips, which were certainly eye opening as regards demographic preferences.”
Mary Ann Von Glinow CIBER Director,
Florida International University
Maurice John Gervais
Simmons School of Management Boston
Anna Lamin
Northeastern University, Boston
Merja Karppinen (visiting for research)
Helsinki School of Economics, Finland
Syed Hussain Ali Jafri
Tarleton State University, Texas
Kanata Ann Jackson
Hampton University, Virginia
Andrea Pru’dhomme
Ohio State University
Rayman D. Meservey
Brigham Young University, Utah
Velagapudi Kanti Prasad
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Daniel Oglevee
Ohio State University
Ted Glickman
George Washington University
Sumit Kundu
Florida International University
Dr. S. Raghunath
Professor, Corporate Strategy & Policy Area, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
The intellectual arena is full of contextual nuances. One could globalize one’s operations, but
one has to customize one’s offering to local settings. Shining’s theory and practice
is terms of managing and strategizing brands, is something that enables companies to make their product and service offering much more tangible, much more valuable for
clients in those settings. It is because they generate a fusion of value in terms of bringing the external, local context into the standardized
best practices that they have
imbibed in a global context.
ReFinE value ladder basically enables people to think in a very integrated way; about how do you generate a very unique positioning vis-à-vis the requirements and aspirations of customers and how do you link that with all the
sub-processes within the organization.
Being sensitive to the customer in the real sense is being conscious and totally aware of the functional, rational and emotional aspirations that the customer has. The Shining process basically addresses those missing dimensions in capturing the customer’s aspirational, functional and emotional needs and bringing that into the organization, into
all its processes, so that the organization, per se, is able to act coherently in delivering value in all these dimensions.
Dr. P.N. Thirunarayana
Professor of Marketing, Wipro Chair Professor of Management, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
When I visited Shining, three words captured it - creativity, passion and energy; in almost everyone I met.
I personally believe these three things are the backbone for any organization to have vitality.
In Shining, I see a capacity for discovering unarticulated frustration; the things that normal eyes cannot see,
because of this observation capacity. New paradigms are born only when there is a crisis and when there is real hope.
Somehow, the way Shining looks at the total ecology surrounding the organization, they get hope. So when there
is a real crisis and real hope, the organizational preparedness to change everything they are doing, increases.
It’s in this sense Shining becomes important. I want Shining to make organization as change masters when they
are doing well; in other words, time-paced, proactive, quantum change.
Shining can be a catalytic agent where it provokes organizations, when they are doing well.
Le Figaro“For audacity he has enough to give away. Using shocking colours, unusual graphic symbols he raises the concept of branding to an art form. Shining, the company he created in 1984, has seduced the biggest companies, Nestle, Proctor & Gamble, Danone. Because he is against restraining ideas, he doesn’t hesitate to surprise.” - Anie Carlo
Elle magazine“Sengupta is the revolutionary designer who dared to use green for yoghurt, wrapped oil ion violet
and orientalized aspartam. Today there is not a woman in Europe who spends a day without touching at least one
of his designs.” - Annick le Flochmoan
LaCroix“It is a genuine love story between France and India. It began one day in November 1973 as young Sengupta descended from the plane from India. Today in his studio perched atop a building in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, Sengupta with joie de vivre defines 4 levels of consumption: vital, comfort, pleasure and spiritual, and uses his paint brushes and pencils to dress the products that the public use everyday.” - Agnes Rotivel
Le Parisien “His work of art is reproduced millions of times and exhibited in all the supermarkets throughout the country, he was the first person to use green for a dairy product. Sengupta maintains a philosophy: the surface of
an object and its interior are in harmony, as a woman has a beautiful face because her soul is beautiful.” - ES
La Tribune “The Indian designer Sengupta directs one of the most original and highly prized consultancies in the capital, Shining with briefly more than sixty celebrated references in consumer products.” - Patrick Lopez
La Vie “You are sure to know the products of this designer for whom all of Europe is fighting. Sengupta of Shining,
a design company in the Plaisance quarter with blue neon lights, subdued atmosphere, thick carpets, designs on display like works of art. Great success, but this has not gone to his head.” - Agnes Cazenave
Liberation “Sengupta’s life has been a success story and he has worked wonders wherever he has gone. He
created his own design company, Shining, in 1984. Amora, Vitalinea, Nivea have all called on him to redesign their products.” - David Ausseil
Shining Consulting is managed professionally. We have two reputed professionals from the corporate world in our advisory board.
