I came across a LinkedIn post linking to an article which called to question the importance of brand names for a business. Essentially it said that any name is fine for a business as it is the product performance which matters ultimately. The note cited examples of successful brands who have seeming run-of-the-mill or names unrelated to their business. For example, Lays has no relation to the category it operates in (potato chips or crisps…
I was at WordUp yesterday – an event organised by Indiblogger in Delhi. I met a lot of popular, accomplished bloggers and was inspired by many of them. The key take aways about how they’ve gone about blogging (either as a profession or as a serious pastime) and personal branding were these: passion for what they do, laser-sharp focus on a domain (food, auto, fashion etc.), enjoying themselves while blogging and making an effort to…
After witnessing the recent marketing blitz by Flipkart, Snapdeal, Amazon and Myntra,I was reminded of a rather well known saying in retailing, “If people went to stores only when they needed to buy and bought only what they needed, the economy would collapse.” While this was originally coined for brick & mortar retail, it has now manifested itself for E-commerce in India. The unprecedented revenues that the players in this marketing jamboree are claiming and…
Recently, while I was designing a course on ‘Strategic Management’ for our Executive Program in Business Analytics, there were two things I decided I will not do: use PowerPoint and throw jargon. Suddenly, a line of thought triggered. While reading up the vast amounts of literature available on strategy, having studied it during my student days, practised it in my corporate career and taught it in various avatars as an academician, I felt a sense…
An interesting discussion with Lakshmanan Narayan, CEO and co-founder of Unmetric in this week’s Storybard, touched upon the topic of brands sponsoring global events. Specifically, the issue was about how with global events like FIFA World Cup, brands not associated with the event in an official capacity as sponsors are gaining mileage through through brand content in social media. So it begs the question, ‘do brands have to be sponsors anymore?’ Brands stealing thunder from…
Of late, there’s been a surfeit of videos for Coca-Cola which can be broadly clubbed under ‘activation’ or Promo. Most of them involve an on-ground event where consumers engage with the Coca-Cola brand directly or indirectly. Some of these activations have gone on to win awards, while many have become viral successes. All of them have the ingredients of great activation programmes. The latest in such videos are these: Coca-Cola Second Lives As part of its…
Years ago, when I was working on a MNC account, the MD of the Indian operations (a Canadian) asked why his ads (for an FMCG brand) were not shown on sports channels during telecast of golf tournaments. When I told him that the numbers didn’t warrant it, he said, ‘but all my friends watch golf’. That’s the trouble with hanging out with only a particular kind of like-minded people and being completely out of touch…
There was a time in my life where virtually everything to do with office productivity was connected to a Microsoft product: the OS on the PC, Outlook mail, Powerpoint for presentations and Word for documents. I was never a spreadsheet guy so my exposure to Excel was minimal. Even when I switched to a Mac, I relied heavily on PowerPoint, Outlook and Excel. And then something changed all that: iWork. I have been a user…
‘Whenever Samsung, Nokia, BlackBerry or any other smartphone company uses a celebrity to hawk their wares, tech bloggers immediately search for instances of that celebrity using an iPhone’ wrote BGR in an article titled, This is easily one of the most annoying things tech bloggers do. The article went on to say: Often times, the celebrities paid to promote these products in a TV commercial, at an event or in some other advertisement don’t actually…
The Twitter world was abuzz today with live updates on the Oscars and the Ellen DeGeneres selfie (which at the time of writing, has clocked 2.4mn RTs and 1.1mn favourites). Samsung was the official sponsor of the event and product placement with Ellen wielding the phone (a Note 3, I guess) was prominent. Even before the event it was announced that Samsung would be sponsoring a special selfies segment and that seemed to be the…