Maruti Vs Hyundai Ads

I wanted to write on the Hyundai ad where it did a comparison of Maruti Suzuki's Ritz in the beginning of the month, but then somehow it slipped out of my mind, but now with Maruti reacting to Hyundai's ad by coming up with a comparative ad of A Star Vs i10 a few days back forced me to comment on it. link

Competititors reacting to each other's ad seems to be a futile exercise, because the focus of these ads is not the consumer, but a competitor and all you are trying do is to counter whatever was said in the earlier ad . A waste of resources and energy , which does not help in anyway the decision making process of buying a car.

Infact buying a car in India, especially at the entry level tends to be more involved and long drawn decision than in the developed context. For many of us it still means a substantial investment and the information we seek is much higher. Does this sort of mud-slinging contest of ads help in anyway the consumer wanting to buy a car? It may help massage the ego of a few in the companies but ....

This sort of reactive and comparative ads is not something which is new, Pepsi Vs Coke, Colgate Vs Pepsodent or the more recent Horlicks Vs Complan, and even for Hyundai and Maruti this is not new....

Mahindra Satyam - Rebranding

Sometime back when the Satyam fiasco happened I had written on how we might actually end up losing one more very powerful brand in India. I would have added it up the list of brands lost in the country , even higher than the loss of Deccan. But the current re-branding of Satyam to Mahindra Satyam seems to have salvaged the situation. The positives of this rebranding exercise has been that they would be able to retain the strength of brand Satyam and add the assurance of Mahindra. Because in spite of all the troubles for the company people have more or less seen it as the result of the doings of a single person and not the company as a whole , and even the recent better than expected also added to the belief that Satyam as a company is still doing well.

But I think the external re-branding exercise is just half of the story, the more difficult exercise would be reassure the employees , motivate them and assimilate them into Mahindra...

Fallen Tree & Implications for Marketers

We had a lot of wind and rain a couple of days back, called "Andhi" in this part of the country and as with every year there were trees uprooted and other damage ... In the park in front of my house there was a reasonably big tree which also fell during this and i observed the tree only after it fell, before that though it was there I had never observed it. Though it might seem strange but this kind of oversight or not seeing something which is there happens quite often, and the marketers also tend to suffer because of that, though this happens more in the case of services than products.

How many of us notice when the service in a restaurant is good, we take it for granted that it has to be that way, ...basic services like power which runs the computers and AC in my room, mobile services, the list goes on ... and a customer also develops a blind spot over time for any additional service or a new feature , over a very short period of time the new service or a feature is accepted as normal and if you want to surprise the customer you have to think about something new...

Life for a marketer is becoming more and more tough..

Claims in Advertisments

I have been observing the claims made in few of ads on the air these days.


The first is the ad of Safola Heart , though the brand is well promoted and the website backing up the brand is also well-designed and informative but the claim made in the ad that 36 people changed just their cooking oil to Safola heart and with nothing else changed their cholesterol levels have come down.


Next is the Lifebouy ad where they claim that a whole building which started using the soap had lesser incidences of children falling sick versus a building where lifebouy was not being used????

Something similar is being claimed by Horlicks in it's ad saying children who drink Horlicks, are taller, healthier and so and on...and to cap it they also claim that it is proven....

As a someone who has some background in research I find it very difficult to accept any of these claims being made by these well-known companies and brands, and the details of any of these claims/Experiments made by these companies are not in public domain, easiest would have been to make them available on their websites so one could check the authenticity of these claims...

I also visited the advertisement standards council of India to check out the existing norms, but could not get much of that also...

Buying Cars Made Easy at Maruti Suzuki

Was checking out the web page of Maruti Suzuki Limited when I saw the new feature which they have added to help people wanting to buy a car. Might have been there for some time ...



The feature helps one see all the cars in the portfolio and compare it with their requirement, and details can be got by clicking on each car.I have always found the Maruti Suzuki site to be more user friendly than the others.

Though this is not a new feature it was on the Toyota site at least 4-5 years back, though today they show all thier offerings in a different way, thought earlier one was much better...