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 …
Today is Christmas, a day where we are supposed to access our ‘giving’ side. It’s a little scary, considering the way in which our ‘giving’ and ‘taking’ sides are so lopsided! But such conjectures aside, in a conversation a few days ago with a restaurant entrepreneur, the difficulty of being good in the conventional sense …
Have you noticed that a flop product or a flop movie is never in the pirate’s stockpile? The bootlegger selling a pirated DVD is the best indicator of authentic market demand. He immediately discards what doesn’t sell – bootlegging what people buy, not what companies arrange to be placed on the shelves. True markets are …
In the evenings in India, at-home ‘tennis’ players begin their daily routine. They unplug what looks like a tennis racquet from the socket and get ready to wage war on a flying swarm – mosquitoes. They aren’t playing the latest version of Kinect or Wii. The bats are real, the mosquitoes are real and the …
While the world’s travel portals have grown enormously over the past decade, an Indian one has been very successful for railway passengers to book tickets online. IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) with an unwieldy URL – www.irctc.co.in has gone on to become a major success. This year, it will have revenues of over $ 2 …
Are you one of those people who tries to sneak past a traffic light just as it’s turning from green to amber? Or would you snake through all the side roads, just to avoid one? People reveal more of themselves on the road than they would in ordinary conversation – without saying a single word …
