We’ve seen it 24 hours a day on our TV screens for the past two decades. It slips under our door in the mornings. It is updated by the minute or the second in social media. When we say ‘news’ each of us has a certain image in our minds. But to a generation brought …
It’s not about selecting partners alone. Even in work spaces, people tend to move toward relationships with co-workers from the same race and social background. It seems as if like begets like is a lot truer than the one about opposites
Dumb question? After all, who tries to create boring advertising? Well, a lot of agencies try creating memorable advertising and end up with boring. Memorable is defined as what customers can remember. Something that will stay in the customer’s overloaded mind. The effort is to think of words and visuals that will ‘break through’ the …
Should your advertising be memorable? Or persuasive? Read More »
We change our clothes twice a day. We change more channels than we watch. We change our mind about what to order on the menu in a restaurant about 10 times in a minute. We change our hairstyle and we expect the whole world has noticed. Or is about to. We change the ring tones …
Coke is a brand. Justin Bieber is a phenomenon. Nike is a brand. Mystery Guitar Man is a phenomenon. Do you see a difference? It is a pretty big one. A brand is built deliberately over several years and a huge amount of thought and money is invested in every single aspect of its creation. …
Salesmen, like waiters, should materialise only when they are needed, not hover in the background like persistent dark clouds. Somehow, the salesman (or woman) who ‘tags’ along wherever you go is almost like the shop owner letting you know you’re being watched and you can’t make away with any merchandise. There’s no real sense of …
In a bid to differentiate its menu, a restaurant in Bangalore offers the ‘Gold Plated Dosa’ at a pricey Rs. 1011/- (There’s some numerology at work here!). That’s about fifteen to twenty times the price of a regular dosa at any decent vegetarian restaurant. So what’s the difference? A little olive oil and a sliver of gold foil placed …
Its origin is local. The owner, Maanikkam Pillai started out a small bakery in the early part of the 1900s and decided that a ‘foreign’ name would bring more patronage. It worked. Much like the Iyengar bakeries that made a virtue of being vegetarian by not using eggs, McRennetts grew by having the ‘non-vegetarian’ range …
In the last one year, there have been several high-profile instances of the power that customers have come to command. The Arab Spring was not just the rising of the citizen against the state. It also signals the rise of the customer class and the ability to force companies to rethink their one-way relationship. When …
Biographers aren’t supposed to have histories. They illuminate the lives of people they write about, much like translators making sense in world assemblies where world leaders hold forth in different tongues. Staying silently in the shadows, not hogging the limelight. So when Robert Kanigel, the biographer of ‘The man who knew infinity’ stepped up to …
