India has traditionally been considered ?under-branded?. But with a strong economy marching towards a historical economic threshold with booming businesses, branding is fast seeping even into the small business ecosystem in the country, thanks to a synergy between the growth of media and technology, and the growth and increasing competition in the marketplace, no matter how local. So anyone who wants to be someone is hiring a publicist to brand themselves and their business, and for enhanced media visibility. Your jeweller and hair dresser probably are doing it, and so is your friendly neighbourhood sweet shop.

This trend attracted 20-something Barkha Arora so strongly that she quit her job as a journalist with a prominent business newspaper four years back to start a small Delhi-based PR firm, Maadhyam PR. She now has a team of eight persons and runs the ?shoestring? agency from a small rented flat close to her house. She feels there is no dearth of small brands and those aspiring-to-be-brands in the city, which, in turn, are willing to hire the services of a PR agency. With their scale of operations understandably low as compared to established national and international brands present in the country, these local players can ill-afford the services of a big corporate PR firm. And that?s where all of Arora?s business comes from?the local players.

?Of course, bigger brands prefer working with bigger agencies, so we depend on the small ones. But the shoestring budget of the local brands doesn?t pinch us, as we don?t have to get them nationwide coverage, but have to only target a certain segment. Even smaller brands have started hiring PR agencies as it is cheaper by at least four-five times as compared to advertising. And, apart from promoting the clients in the local media, agencies like ours also help clients in advertising, mall promotions and organising events as well,? says Arora.

In recent years, a slew of PR agencies have mushroomed, essentially serving smaller local brands. ?I won?t call them agencies, rather outfits with three-ten people. These are outfits that have presence only in say one metro. Some small ones in tier II or III cities just work as local affiliates for bigger agencies,? says Nitin Mantri, CEO, Avian Media, and vice-president of Public Relations Consultants? Association of India (PRCAI), an industry body representing top national agencies. ?When I returned to India five years back, there wasn?t exactly a deluge of PR firms. It?s only in the last three years that so many PR agencies have mushroomed. With increasing competition, even local brands feel the need of being heard, so they are going big on advertising and PR,? he adds. As per PRCAI analysis, the PR industry in India amounts to as much as Rs 700 crore, and is growing at a rate of almost 20% annually. While exact numbers on the frugal one-city PR agencies are not available, Mantri believes their numbers are growing rapidly since the past couple of years. ?There are many small-medium agencies that are regional and present in only one or two cities, whereas the national agencies would presently be between 25-30 in number,? he adds.

Looking at the needs of local players who usually have very small budgets, the way the PR industry functions is also changing. Most of these small agencies are quite project-driven, some are focusing only on digital marketing, while some on product launches. The small agencies are also finding their niche?while some serve only beauty clients, some on restaurants, IT and so on. Since such agencies mostly have presence in just one city, the nature of business in the city definitely has an impact on their operations, and obviously, their client list. For instance, in Bangalore, most small agencies earn their revenue from software clients. ?Over the time, consolidation will happen in the PR space. In fact, some of it has already started,? says Mantri of PRCAI. Siddhartha Mukherjee, business head, Eikona PR Measurement, calls this a welcome trend. ?Amongst the various brand communication tools available, Public Relations is certainly turning out to be the most cost effective one. No wonder then, these local brands and entrepreneurs are hiring PR consultancies (agencies) who bring in special expertise and bandwidth to handle their media visibility even in the small town and semi-urban landscapes,? he says.

Local brands are clear that they want to grab eyeballs of those who matter. Their budgets might be small, but that is not deterring them from going ahead and advertising on local radio stations, niche magazines, micro-editions of newspapers and city supplements of national dailies, cable TV channels and even hiring a PR agency to send regular ?press updates? and releases to the city media.

?We advertise in salon and beauty magazines (and there are a plethora of them) and at times in national newspapers. While advertising may or may not help, hiring a PR agency has definitely helped us build our brand. Online, too, we are making our presence felt by tying up with deal websites that have emerged,? says Naraayan Shreshtha, owner of Hair and Shanti, which has six salons in NCR. It spends around 10-15% of its revenues on advertising and branding.

In the upmarket Sunder Nagar area, restaurant-owner Anand Gupta recently opened a new fine dining restaurant, ?Anandas?. Since then, it?s a regular routine for its PR agency to send updates to the media on new menu and initiatives by the restaurant. ?Since we are new in the market, we hired a PR agency to gradually create awareness regarding our brand. We are not hugely advertising right now, since that is an expensive proposition when compared to hiring a PR firm,? says Gupta.

Delhi-based make-up artist Aashmeen Munjal, through focused branding and advertising initiatives, has become a popular name and face in the capital, despite owning just two beauty parlours in the city. Munjal feels that in the highly competitive market today, it is important to plough back a part of the revenue in advertising and PR. ?We advertise on cable network, radio, print and also outdoor to target the city-centric audience. At the same time, online presence helps in reaching out to even the global audience. Though word-of-mouth is very important in a local set-up, creating brand awareness through these media works as the brand gets bigger,? she says. Munjal, who runs two beauty parlours in Delhi, spends 30% of her revenue on advertising.

Apart from these PR agencies with frugal set-ups and localised operations, the other undisputed beneficiary of a spurt in local advertising and branding has been radio. The private FM radio explosion in Indian cities over the past few years has been able to create a demand-supply synergy between local advertisers and operations of these stations, and research substantiates this. As per KPMG analysis, the share of ad revenue for radio stations has seen a definitive shift from around 20% local advertisers in 2007, to over 40% in 2010. Rajesh Jain, head of media and entertainment at KPMG, feels local and regional advertisers have really fuelled the growth of local and regional media markets. ?There is a significant jump in the local and regional markets that are growing at a much faster rate than the national market, thanks to local and regional advertisers. One can particularly see radio, regional print and regional TV channels growing rapidly. And the local PR industry can be considered a direct beneficiary of the way these markets are evolving,? he says. While print, through city supplements and micro-editions, has for quite sometime attracted advertising from local players to the extent of being almost saturated, radio continues to be an enticing option for local advertisers. As per KPMG?s media report of 2010, percentage of regional ad local ad volumes in print have been over the 95% mark.

However, with private FM radio conquering new frontiers in rapidly increasing listener-ship and is expanding to include more cities, it?s impact just can?t be missed. According to the analysis of TAM Adex, the advertising measurement vertical of TAM Media Research, local brands, showrooms and stores, termed as independent retailers by TAM Adex, have consistently been among the top advertisers? category on radio since the past four years. Independent retailers have been placed on the second spot in the overall radio advertising mesh for the past couple of years, with a consistent advertising share of 6%. The only category that pips them is mobile phone services, with a 7% share. And over the next four years, advertising on radio is expected to grow between 14% in 2011 to 19% in 2014, according to KPMG analysis.

Brand experts believe that while advertising by local players has existed for quite sometime now, pointing at newspaper classifieds and the birth of many a city supplement of major newspapers around a decade-and-a-half ago, and the growing number of city-specific magazines and B2B publications, what has changed is that marketing has now gone beyond advertising for these players and involves branding and a more structured media approach. ?The competition has become intense and there is increasingly a need to stand out for any brand, big or small, and local, regional or national. For local brands, it is a combination of many phenomena, like entry of institutional retailers, the way many of the erstwhile small showrooms in our cities have expanded to have multiple branches, growth in aspirations and booming business growth,? says Rajesh Lalwani, principal, Scenario Consulting, a firm that deals with brand positioning and identity. Lalwani adds that it?s a positive trend as even small and local players are fast understanding the importance and value of branding.

And, with the web and social media becoming an almost-integral part of the urban life, many local businesses are excited about advertising and marketing themselves through internet ads, or even easier, through Facebook pages and blogs. There has also been a rapid increase in the number of firms offering online marketing solutions to brands and businesses, but small and local players do not possess a substantial share of that pie yet. However, even big corporations like Google look at the growing urge of small businesses to market themselves and the kind of ecosystem that the online world provides as a great business opportunity in the days to come. ?Now, almost all business have started looking at the online world proactively as a sales and distribution channel and not just as an advertising vehicle. Even for small and medium businesses, social networking is the new media as social networks bring the power of viral message distribution to the table. There are innovative ways to advertise and communicate in an interactive manner. Internet on the mobile is exploding and there is an exponential growth in this segment and business are looking at it quite seriously. However, since much of it is still emerging, it would take some time for these two to be adopted properly and aggressively,? says Sridhar Seshadri, online sales head, Google India.

With things looking to just get better, and expectedly a growing number of local retailers across sectors discovering branding and media communications as a crucial element going forward, Barkha and others like her can sense good days ahead.