If you stop by at Haveli, a 23-acre food plaza on the Delhi-Amritsar stretch of GT Road, you will find a very worried looking Satish Jain. He is the owner of the restaurant that has been voted India’s Best Highway Eatery by myriad surveys. That’s the worry, he says. His restaurant, on the outskirts of Jalandhar, is so popular that there are now Havelis in Karnal, Ambala, Ludhiana and Mohali—and none of them is his. “My brand is being destroyed,” he says.

“We are now opening a new restaurant on GT Road in Sonepat and people ask me why am I opening one in Sonepat when I already have a complex in Karnal. I am tired of explaining that I don’t have any other restaurant apart from this one (in Jalandhar),” says Jain.

Like Jain, Ashok Mittal gets upset every time a Lovely Sweets gets inaugurated at a street corner in Punjab. Mittal, whose family-owned Lovely Sweets became so popular that the family diversified into various businesses including auto dealerships and now a private university with a huge campus, says people identify his Lovely Sweets brand with quality but now the counterfeits are ruining it all. “The name is everything. When we started Lovely University, a lot of people told me that it was a weird name for a university. So when we initially put out advertisements, we tried some other names. But the response was poor. Later we put out advertisements calling it Lovely University, and the response was stupendous. That’s our brand equity,” he says.

... contd.