About 20 years ago, a news item hit the headlines that a business group spent more than Rs 150 crores in designing its company's logo. When I went through this news, I wondered, how can someone spend so much just to make such a small change in its logo and is it worth?
Well, with the passing of time, when I started thinking about things deeply, I realized why we buy a product or service from a particular company, while we may be getting the same or better quality goods / services from other companies and that too possibly at a less amount.
In fact, the purchase of an item/service is determined later by its quality or other intrinsic qualities, but prior to that we think about the brand and that affects our decision to a great extent.
This is the reason that today all brands are very conscious about their logo or their image and spend a handsome amount on these things.
Image / perception is equally important not only for a brand / institution, but also for any individual. It is the image or perception that creates an overview (good or bad) about any person whom we have never met, whom we have never worked with.
In fact, perception of a person contributes a great deal in assessing someone and it builds on the basis of work, conduct and culture of any individual for a long time and on the basis of that perception, the credibility of any person is being judged.
As a human being, it is important to have the courage to say right for right and wrong for wrong and determine his views on the basis of issues.
A person should not be guided or influenced by any one in a meeting or in a group and should have the courage to put his views irrespective of the fact that he would come in the eyes of another person and should not start evaluating things on the basis of profit and loss.
When you try to swim against the wave, it may have some disadvantages for the time being but in the long run, persistence of ideas certainly helps in the amelioration of a human being, which also paves the way for his progress.
So as a human being it is necessary that we should have an image of a person who people can trust, but at the same time I feel that sometimes we get so much engrossed in the habit of building our image in a particular mold that we start living a proxy life. What we do is very different from what we think.
So I personally believe that one should always be open to learn the good things from others, take inspiration from the good deeds done by others, but stick to his originality.
Since childhood, we have been reading that if a person loses wealth, it can be recouped, but if a person loses his credibility it becomes very difficult to regain.
(The writer is Vice President in Prabhat Khabar Group, Columnist in different Newspapers and websites and a YouTuber. He can be contacted on bahadur.pk@gmail.com.)