MUMBAI: St Luke's India head Praveen Kenneth has severed ties with the London based mother company - St Luke's and has decided to kickstart his own agency.
Kenneth and ad man Andy Law announced the launch of their global marketing services venture - Law & Kenneth Worldwide. The agency will have offices in six markets in the next one month -- London, Mumbai, Dubai, Stockholm, Sydney and Paris.
In the pipeline are also plans for opening agencies in China, Germany, South Africa, Russia, Italy, South Korea, Japan and the US in the coming three-six months. The plan is to be in 18 key markets within the next one year.
The agency will bring together the best of advertising experts, teams and agencies in each territory to deliver truly global solutions to modern multinational brands in each local market – building relevant teams and structures, that are important to each market and clients needs.
The effort is to establish dedicated local entrepreneurs to focus on providing services to help build brands, which will drive the concept of brand partnership leading to ownership.
Law & Kenneth Worldwide chairman Andy Law said, "The biggest need of the hour today across every clients boardroom around the world, is partnerships that will strengthen their brands in the marketplace. A partnership that goes beyond just a financial and business transaction. The purpose for our existence to be exactly that -- their brand partner."
The market criteria and priority that the agency will have a presence in have been decided on two parameters. Firstly, the potential of the market in the coming two-five years. Secondly and most importantly, the quality of agencies that the world wide holding company is buying into.
The network's offering will span the full marketing services spectrum, from business development to advertising to branding to communications to digital and ambient media.
Talking about the single-minded philosophy at the core of Law & Kenneth Worldwide co-chairman and managing director Praveen Kenneth said, "We absolutely believe in the power of building brands and businesses by empowering local market leaders to drives their own business. We encourage them to set their own business goals and way of working, which will be done keeping in mind each markets client need and the teams aspiration to provide and be the best. We aim to keep the independence and freedom of each market as much as they are strongly linked to the larger purpose of the brand Law & Kenneth, which is to be the finest business partners in the industry,offering service that is light (on the clients pockets), right (relevant to the task on hand), and tight (focused approach).
Law added, "We will bridge emerging and mature economies and have a global perspective from day one. This is in fact the world’s first East-meets-West company designed to maximise the synergy’s of emerging environments with the wisdom of mature markets. To be a truly global network today, you just can’t be in London or New York and dictate brand growth in China or India or Brazil. Therefore it is essential that the core of the agency’s top people will need to build themselves around these markets, rather than just having branch offices or just buying agency’s blindly. To put it plainly, having a worldwide creative director is of no use in one of the biggest markets like China, where new brands will start driving the world in the coming future, when he or she doesn’t even know the language, the culture or the sensitivity of that markets corporate culture."
Law, intends to challenge the way global clients are advised. He is in fact already involved closely with training the marketing teams of the biggest client brands in China, Brazil and Europe.
Also by introducing the concept of Open Source Creativity, Law & Kenneth Worldwide will tap into creative hotspots around the world without overburdening each office with unnecessary layers of people and duplicating resources.
Kenneth said the venture is also the world’s first global nodal network. "Every multinational CEO, Andy and I have met around the world in the last few months expect radical approaches to help them win in their market place, but it’s unfortunate that we in the industry, haven’t changed our approach to help drive our client’s business. We somewhere seem to have forgotten that the client’s business and his brands are centre to our existence."
Each node will benefit from a centralised new-business function, a high-profile chairman, plus marketing, finance and legal services. They will also be able to tap in to expert specialist advisers including Body Shop founders Anita and Gordon Roddick, musician and creative thinker Dave Stewart, former HSBC Worldwide chief executive Bill Dalton and international philosopher and social observer Professor Theodore Zeldin.
