Ethics and marketing go hand in hand

Today i was treveling through humble but jam packed BEST bus, these advertisement plackards pasted on the upper side of the windows caught my attention inadvertently. There is nothing new in their format , but this time they are carrying message which was subtle but important. One message reads Please check carefully beneath your seat before seating and carrying a toll-free no.. The important thing to note is this message is from a mobile phone company and the othee one from a FMCG company.

Welcome to era of ethical marketing!!

This trend is not new but is being used extensively these days by marketers. Whether it is Save tiger campaign of Aircel or Save trees use mobile phone campaign of Idea, everyone wants to associate itself with a social cause or other. Few days back Idea came for earth hour campaign when it appealed to turn off lights for an hour to cut the Carbon emmission of the World , then came its campaign that was related to the Public security where they talked about donating all the money of usage to a charity for the victims of 26/11 attack.
The same thing was tried by Times of India when they came with Lead India campaign and talked about the corrupt political structure of the country. HT never left back and came with a campaign of ethical reporting.
Way back in 2003 Surf excel brought about a new by saying

"Do bucket Pani Ab Rojana hai Bachana". & then many companies started making ads with social messages. Idea with "What an Idea sirji " campaign gve it a new direction.

Every brand has started to make its way to the minds of customers by portraying themselves as their well wisher, some one who cares for them in true sense. HT came up with NO TV DAY in mumbai to give human relationship more importance & Earth Day doesn't need any introduction

Hoping to see a lot more in coming years!!

Browse the World through me!! not them..

Looking to browse the whole hoards of information, now you have got options Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, AOL Explorer, Netscape!! etc. etc.
But war begun in earlier 90's with the advent of WWW an hypertext based system. Netscape came with Netscape nevigator and dominated market at that time but soon Microsoft arrived in the market with it's Internet Explorer 2.0. But internet explorer was available for free!!

During 90's many new versions were launched in the market but they were just bug fixes most of time. But competition become sour when Microsoft internet explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found that giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached which read "From the IE team." The message also read "We Love You." The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their dinosaur Mozilla mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18". This worsened the Browser war when Microsoft integrated it's Internet explorer which was widely criticised by browser industry, because acc. to them it would made IE as monopolistic as compatible platform with the then widely used Windows OS. They were not wrong though their speculation became truth and Internet explorer 5.0 & 6.0 became synonymous with web browser for next whole decade.

But now the internet explorer is getting serious threats from various enriched Web browsers!
like they give you facility to return back to the same browsed pages if browser shut down accidently or spellcheckers or options to clear your private data before you even open your browser. Opera's one of the most interesting features is the speed dial feature.that means once you add speed dial to a website, you can simply type in the number of that website in order to access it. If you ever forget what numbers are assigned to which websites, all you you have to do is open a tab and it will give you the speed dial screen. Another feature that comes in handy is the thumbnail feature with regards to tabs. All the user needs to do is to place your cursor over the tabs and a small screen will pop up and give you a miniature version of what is in that tab.

On 17 June 2008, Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 which added a new layout, bug fixes . It also included separate themes for different operating systems and a redesigned download manager.

Google released an open source browser called Google Chrome for Microsoft Windows on December 11, 2008, using the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and claiming a faster JavaScript engine called V8.

Mac OS X and Linux versions are under development. Chrome had a 1.4% usage share by April 2009.

Shrinking market sour toothed microsoft so on March 19, 2009, they released Internet Explorer 8 which added accelerators, improved privacy protection, and a compatibility mode for pages designed for Internet Explorer 7.

NetApplications also reported that, as of April 2009, Internet Explorer had a 66% market share, compared with Firefox's 22% and Safari's 8%, leaving Chrome, Opera and all the others sharing the remaining 4%.In 2009 both Safari and Firefox released versions with advanced Java script Engines

On June 13, 2009 Mozilla released version 3.5 of Firefox which added web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine.This multi polarisation of browser market has opened the gates for new innovatons and developments in the browser market and giving user a new level of browsing the world.

Big Brands on the moVe!!!

On 29 th June, Tata unveiled its two newly acquired brands! Jaguar, and The Land Rover
Tata when acquired these brands last year, they made it clear not to launch these brands hastily then what happened now?? When every automobile segment is worst hit why is it need now?
The reason is Indian market of b-segment car market is rising rapidly and is supposed to leave Japan in dust in coming 10 years, which is second largest market of these B-segment luxury cars after China. When Europe & American customer are settling themselves with lower segment cars. while Brazil,Russia, and China are having high demands of Luxury cars!!

Indian market today sees a sale of around 10,000 cars in this premium segment which scores of around 400 Crore. Tata wagon will again ride on trust and faith the brand generated in Indian market. Although these brands will be sold on their names. So Tata's decision to roll out big names noe is truly justified. Although Tata has kept the assembling plant abroad and has no plans to bring it to India soon.
Jaguar will be competing with already established brands in market like Mercedes, Nissan, Volvo, Audi & BMW.
"The luxury-car market in India is very small, but there is a huge opportunity there," notes Jaguar Land Rover chief executive David Smith.
"We expect it to grow fast over the next 5-10 years."

Eveready LED commercial

'Give me Red' says a commercial in the early 90's of last century and positioned itself as one of the well known brand of yester years. The company is back again with a bang and a brand new condept of Pikapika which means light painting. With declining market of dry batteries, the young generations are slowly forgetting dry batteries these days. The market needed an eye catching add after long duration of 5 years. Y&R Rediffusion has done a great job with this advertisements!!

The aim of the advertisement is to use all the equipments which run on dry battery.So Shivaji Dasgupta branch manager Rediffusion Y&R Kolkatta decided to use a digital camera and led flairs that work entirely on the high strength batteries!! To clearly state this message, when ad begins there comes a caption stating that all equipments are working on high strength Eveready Ultima battery. Good attempt to connect with the target audience that is youth.

Stating views of bigwigs of advertising industry:

Naren Multani, films division head, McCann Erickson, says, “The execution route taken by Eveready has an uncanny resemblance to the Sprint Ahead commercial.”

Sainath Chowdhary of Corcoise has already approved the purpose of advertisements although he is bit skeptic about the story told in advertisements and says that message can be shown in some better way though.

Naresh Gupta of publicis says that the advertisments lacks a story to tell and it implored two message in it. First the basic give me red message and second that now eveready has a battery with more power.

Although sprint already used same approach to promote it's new range of product. So concept is not new but its introduction to indian market. All we hope to see some more pikapika & innovative promotions form Eveready!!

ZooZoo is the new breed of animation

Friends If you were following IPL then there is no way you wouldn't recognize these cute characters which came during breaks and tells you about various customer value added services of Red telecom company Vodafone . Zoozoo as they are called were not animated characters but real human beings in rubber suits. it's the innovative initiative of Vodafone's O&M team to create such characters. Zoozoo has touched the heart of Indian audienceand were successful to outreach their message of Vodafone being sevice oriented.

If we look back when hutch existed, there were two animated characters mike & minni in their advertisements. So idea was not entirely new but creative enough to draw viewers' attention. Although the hutch orange's Pug is succesfully turned into Happy to help customer service logo of Vodafone. Zoozoo has made a longlasting impression over the TV audience. Time of airing ads was also chosen to increase chances of its visiblity. Zoozoo are so popular that they have fan clubs on various social networking sites. You can even downloads merchandise available on the different websites. The zoozoos can be said as the most creative ads of thses season & Vodafone is succeeded again in leaving a bright impression in Telecom consumers mind.

Lemon is new battlefield!!

Lemon is making its big presence this summer with its usher in the organised market in India.
It has sidelined many heavy weight cola drinks and created his own market and pushed the roadside nimbu-paniwala into frenzy. When biggies like Coca Cola company and Parle agro has come up with refreshing lemon drinks the market has widened and divided into flavoured aerated cold drinks and bottled lemonade. And companies have locked their horns and claws to snatch the market from each other.

Lemon drinks has also come in the wake of already forgotten Limca in the market which is a carbonated lemon drink . For years this territory was uncontested but now have figured LMN, Nimbooz by 7up. The war has spurred but under control and ethical till now while everyone is payuing attention towards large market and not towards competitors.The strategy is to be leader in the niche market of lemon drinks first and seeing competetion next.

LMN from Parle stable is again following same pricing strategy with small tetra packings which are easy to transport and carry while 7up is having benifit of strong supply chain of Coca Cola Co.

The war is on and marketers must keep a close look

Are we in the middle of the sea?

Today, Stock market has become so volatile leading to a global meltdown, and companies are finding it difficult to survive the down turn, through cost cuts, job cuts; its time for organisations to explore new open avenues & innovate in order to become more successful. Companies have to put on their thinking caps & will have to again sit on drawing table to formulate strategies which will make them more resilient in coming future!

This is the best learning period for any organisation, to think & retrospect where are they going wrong!!

It is also also the best time for new start-ups to take benefit of service voids. 

Financial institutions & Banks are cautious but ready to disburse loan at lower interest rate as RBI keep on slashing Repo - reverse Repo rates compiling them again to distribute as much money as they can in economy.

Well coming months are also deciding one as elections are also looming up and Budget round the corner. Government is heavily burdened to acheive tagertted GDP of 7.1% which means this quarter it should post a GDP of around 7.8 % .

Deflation is again a big problem but this month has shown some positive response with increase in manufacturing sector production index . Automobiles has posted a growth of around 35% as compared to same month in last year. Other sectors has also started moving upwards with service sector again leading from front. With jolting economy, companies are inhibiting and planning their moves accordingly.

We can just cross our fingers & hope to come out of this bhavsaagar safe & sound!