Shombit Sen Gupta: Brands and the art of living

Abstract

Artist, designer and brand guru, Shombit Sen Gupta, founder of the Paris-based Shining Strategic Design, with a list of clients that reads like a corporate who’s who, conversed with P N Thirunarayana, M Jha, YLR Moorthi and N Balasubramanian, on a wide range of issues from the art of branding to aesthetics and creativity. Sen Gupta's philosophy is reflected in his ‘Pyramid of Consumption’ in which he asserts that a product must traverse up and down from the vital to the spiritual aspects, in all socio-economic levels, to make a lasting mark. This lack of scalability, he explains, was responsible for the failure of several famous brands. Applying his ‘thinking brand’ concept to international corporations like Unilever, Danone, Nestle and Nivea among others and Indian corporations such as Britannia, Marico, Reckitt & Coleman and Wipro, where he created the rainbow flower symbol, Sen Gupta argues that brands must be based on differentiation, they must first provoke the consumer and then lead to understanding. An artist by training and predilection, his sense of colour, his rootedness in basics, his appreciation of Leonardo da Vinci and Freud together have gone to create the unique Shining effect.