A Brand is Born
Divya Prakash
Sophomore at Occidental College, Aspiring science journalist
Sandhya Panchapakesan
Marketing Strategist, Neythri Executive Committee Member
It all began with a conversation. A dozen of them. In April, 2020, Rupal Hollenbeck, former Senior Vice President of Marketing at Oracle — and Neythri Founding Circle member — embarked on the journey of creating a brand framework for Neythri. Neythri is a global community of South Asian professional women dedicated to creating collaborative spaces to share knowledge and resources that will help them unlock their potential. At its surface, this nascent organization appeared vastly different from the multinational tech company where she had worked. But Rupal wanted to look beneath the surface.
How do we capture the essence of this mission and share it with our audience in a comprehensible way?
She began by interviewing the three founders (Mythili Sankaran, Chitra Nayak, and Sruthi Ramaswami), then the marketing committee, then other Founding Circle members: the most personal way of understanding firsthand what Neythri really meant to the women it served — and what they aspired for it to mean.
And what she found was a solidarity of sound bytes.
“Starting with those interviews, one thing that was really clear and very encouraging, is that there was a lot of consistency…and not only were the words consistent, but they also related to each other,” Rupal said.
Spurred by the unity of Neythri members’ visions for this organization — as she estimated 80 percent of the interviews echoed similar themes — Rupal began to type her notes from the interviews into a word cloud, a tool for visualizing words based on their frequencies. The more frequently her interviewees had used a particular word, the bolder it appeared in the word cloud.
“There weren’t a million [words used]. There were maybe 50, or maybe even 20 big ones. I wanted to reflect it back to people. ‘Hey, this, this is what you all are saying and it’s consistent. And to prove how consistent it is, look at this word cloud,” Rupal said. “You just kind of nod as you’re looking at it, like ‘Yeah, yeah. That is who we are. And that is not only who we are, but it’s who we want to continue to be and who we aspire to be.’”
Community. Professional. Women. Connection. South Asian. These were the largest words on the word cloud — and thus, the most frequently-occuring words in Rupal’s interviews. While the visual presents these simply as words, they represent the genesis of an organization which, today, strives to turn conversation into action and to enable South Asian women to fulfill their professional dreams and help them grow, thrive and support one another.
In short, they represent the Neythri brand.
While the word “brand” on its own might seem to connote something permanent and universal, like McDonald’s golden arches, Rupal asserts that the Neythri brand is far from stagnant. It is dynamic and vital, as alive as the human beings it aims to represent.
“Creating a brand is really a journey, and it’s a long term journey,” Rupal said. “[It is] something that is made by us, that represents us and what we aspire to be.”
The key to carrying through this journey, according to Rupal, is consistency and frequency of investment.
“If you think about a brand like Nike — Nike didn’t just all of a sudden have a swoosh and people knew what Nike stood for, ‘just do it,’” she said. “You need to flood the community and the marketplace with valuable information that is on-brand.”
This can come in the form of social media posts, events, mentorship, or even just a mutually supportive conversation with another Neythri member. When Neythri’s members themselves can tangibly feel the community and solidarity of this network, this organization’s brand promise begins to flourish.
In Rupal’s words, “the biggest ambassadors of any brand are the members themselves.”
Neythri’s most powerful marketing tool is word of mouth, according to Rupal. This is entirely fitting for an organization whose name itself connotes a woman leader, a shining light — Neythri women reach out to other women, guiding them towards this mutually supportive space that nurtures their professional aspirations and acutely understands the cultural pressures they face on the road to attaining them.
Growing up as the only South Asian child at her school in Connecticut, Rupal herself is intimately acquainted with these unique pressures. She estimates that there were “maybe five” South Asian women in her town, and later, not many more among her classmates at Boston College.
In terms of a South Asian community for her, “there was next to nothing,” she said. “You were just trying to make it. You were just trying to figure things out and usually when you were doing something, you were the first to do it.”
Rupal is certainly not the only woman to have had such an experience. It is no surprise, then, that inclusion became one of the defining aspects of Neythri’s brand domain. In fact, four of the six aspects of its brand — its domain, personality, reflection, and ultimately, its promise — center around creating a community that is strong, resilient, empowering, and welcoming.
“That’s one of the reasons why a lot of women like myself want to contribute to this organization. We don’t want the path to be as challenging as it was for us,” she said. “And so it’s time for us to create a collective…so that we’re helping each other grow in the next phases of our careers, but we’re also helping the next generation. It’s really comforting to know that this community exists for young women like my [teenage] daughter…Her journey is going to be so different. And I hope that it’s in part because of organizations like Neythri that exist to support her.”
In branding this organization, Rupal had to consider how a single framework could possibly encapsulate the identities of a group as diverse as South Asian women. South Asian women can be senior Fortune 500 executives or high school students approaching their college apps. They can be Nepali or Indian, Pakistani or Guyanese, multiethnic or multiracial. They can be recent immigrants or born-and-bred Americans, they can be queer and trans, they can be disabled. Some may have grown up in South Asian enclaves like Cupertino, California or Edison, New Jersey; others may still be longing for their first embrace from a welcoming South Asian community.
Neythri’s brand framework, then, must be specific enough to lend this organization a distinctly Desi character, yet broad enough to remain authentically inclusive, united by members’ commonalities and welcoming of their differences. Rupal has worked with myriad brands in her career, from Oracle to Intel and its customers Dell to HP. So in order to build such a framework, she drew inspiration from groups as diverse as Neythri’s own member base.
“I went back to different brands to pull…from all of those different brand frameworks to create this one for Neythri,” she said. “I used elements from Microsoft’s framework, I used elements from Nike’s framework, to create a template. And then I took the information from the interviews and actually used them to populate the framework.”
According to Rupal, having a clear and communicable vision is vital to an organization, since Neythri’s core values will remain steadfast even as its brand evolves.
“Brands absolutely evolve over time… of course, our brand is going to evolve,” Rupal said. ”But if you think about a person — you know, I’m going to get a different haircut. I’m gonna do my makeup differently. I’m going to wear different clothes as I get older, but who I am as a person, my values. Those don’t really change.”
Of course, these positive brand attributes must translate into direct action. For Neythri, this action is born from a community, begun with a conversation, and sustained as a commitment.
One example of an ideal outcome Rupal mentioned could be women entrepreneurs securing funding, as a direct result of a Neythri funding event.
Another ideal is “The mentor relationships that we created for the next generation, for the young professionals, actually [contributing] to their promotions,” Rupal said. Then, the question becomes “‘How do we make those promotions visible to other members of the community?’ And so that’s what I mean by taking community and taking conversation and translating it into action.”
For these dynamic ideals to come alive, Neythri wants to equip its members to defy pigeonholed expectations and have an expansive, high-octane understanding of their professional possibilities.
“[We don’t] want to have three ‘swimlanes’ dictate your life. I think there are opportunities for us to dispel myths, to shatter stereotypes and to foster the diversity of our own population,” Rupal said. “I think that’s the next frontier. Neythri is not one-dimensional. Neythri is not one swimlane.”
For Rupal, the essence of Neythri lies in the culmination of all this community, conversation, and action. It’s about the notion of who and where you envision yourself to be expanding so limitlessly that every dream seems within your power to achieve — whether it’s embarking on a new career or dramatically growing your skillset or even becoming the next vice-president of the United States.
“Neythri is about unlocking your potential,” Rupal said. Whatever or whomever you choose to be, “hopefully Neythri has played some part in helping [you] … for me, that’s what it’s all about.”
Author Bios:
Divya is a storyteller who enjoys listening to people, coding, and chasing leads. Her interests — linguistics, literature, data visualization — lend a compelling vantage point to journalism, a field built on understanding people and systems. She loves words — she edits with a keen eye for grammar and precise shades of meaning, and strives to imbue empathy and flair into everything she writes and does.
Sandhya is an analytical problem solver with diverse experience in computer science, Human Resources, and marketing strategy. She combines technical prowess with strong interpersonal and organizational skills to create data-driven solutions for businesses.
