Most of us know of JCB and Caterpillar. Fewer of us would have heard of Bull
Machines Pvt Ltd, the Coimbatore manufacturer of backhoe loaders that now
sells in over 65 countries.
I hadn’t heard of them either, till I ran into an interview with their founder, V.
Parthiban. In it he says, “We focus on innovation and technical excellence,
because we can’t compete with multinational companies on advertising and
branding…”
“We focus on innovation and technical excellence, because we can't compete with multinational companies on advertising and branding…”
While the first half made sense, the second made me think.
Bull seems to have made a clear strategic choice. Rather than trying to match
marketing spends with multinational competitors, it attempts to out-engineer
them, building machines better suited to the markets it serves.
Interested, I visited their website and ran into a fascinating set of dictums they
call the Bull Philosophy. What struck me was the language.
“Low aim is a crime.”
“For everything else, I demand data.”
“The word ‘can’t’ is removed from our vocabulary.”
“I view my job and life as a game of solving problems.”
These didn’t read like the familiar Integrity, Excellence and Customer Focus
that emerge from every corporate values workshop. They felt instead like ideas that could only have come from Bull’s own lived experience, expressed
with a raw directness that carried the charge of a credo.
Reading them, I realised that much of what made me relate to Bull had little to
do with its machines.
Having grown up in this part of the country, I’ve always been fascinated by the
culture of its engineering companies. I recognise its patterns: competence
without adornment, ingenuity matched by persistence, fearless ambition, and
an instinct to understate achievement.
Someone discovering Bull from Punjab or Uttarakhand is unlikely to read
those cues accurately. Someone in South Africa or Morocco even less so.
When you don’t understand its cultural context, Bull is simply an engineering
company from an unfamiliar place.
It seemed therefore that the Bull Philosophy was not an appendix to the
engineering story. It had to be the reason for its engineering taking the shape it
does.
The reputations of engineering companies are built through products, and
their communication should be led by performance and customer outcomes.
But there is this other layer that would makes the product stories far more
convincing by revealing the beliefs and standards that shaped them.
Good brand communication doesn’t compete with product communication.
Product communication tells you what the machine can do. Culture helps you
understand the people who built it.
A brochure, website or product film by Bull shouldn’t feel like something JCB
or Caterpillar might have made if their budgets were smaller budget. It should
feel unmistakably like Bull.
And that brings me back to Parthiban’s observation.
If branding simply means advertising, I understand his choice.
But brand communication has a greater role which makes it an essential – it
reveals those critical values that are already present but are but often not
readily visible.
For challenger brands, this is a competitive advantage that depends less on
matching the budgets of larger rivals, and more on the ability to express their
strengths with originality and conviction.
Leave a Reply