Full Circle and Carbide Free Mangoes

For the last 3-4 years I have stopped enjoying the mangoes during the summer. And I stay in the heart land Dasheri mango in eastern UP. The reason is that the satisfaction I would get from eating mangoes has been going down, because most of them have not ripened naturally. They have been ripened by using chemicals. The same is true with many vegetables that we buy today. Saw the Infibeam.com ad in that context and thought of sharing it,

  

That is where the issue of opportunity for marketers to capitalize on the dissatisfaction of consumers comes in. A huge market for with the organic and chemical free fruits and vegetables.....

The full circle is the topic for another blog post

Interview with D Shivakumar, PepsiCo CEO

Recently had an opportunity to listen to him at a conference and would rate him very high on his understanding of the Indian market. In the conference he spoke more about telecom  market where he has substantial experience.

In this interview he shares his view on the foods business, lots of food for thought....

Summer Brands

With Summer setting in many marketers are rolling up their sleeves for the hot summer sales which will follow, most excited would be the Ice cream , Soft drink and AC marketers.....

Yesterday was in a typical kirana store buying the monthly regulars, interestingly the small shop is exactly on top of a larger EasyDay shop...but more on that later..

In the shop I saw the packs of Rasna ready-to-make drink, and suddenly started feeling nostalgic on how central the brand use to 25-30 years back in terms of the summer experience. The presence of the Rasna bottle in the monthly purchase bag would trigger a long elaborate process of preparing the drink, sugar + powder + concentrate (in a separate small bottle) and transferring the same into large glass bottles would mark the start of serious summer.

               

While I was still ruminating, my three old daughter coolly picked-up a bottle of Fanata and did not even look at the Rasna boxes… In today's world full of aerated drinks and instant drinks (sugar added) the excitement around older brands like Rasna is missing....

But from a branding perspective one does feel that the brand still has a lot of potential (not sure with the right target segment though..)

The brands which I very closely associate with summers would be Kelvinator ,  Target, Chacha Chowdry . …

Review – The wave Rider By Ajit Balakrishnan

Just finished the book so thought will write a quick review…

The author is the founder and CEO of rediff.com. I think most of us ( meaning my age group) would have had a rediff mail account at some point.

A short book, around 160 pages leaving out the notes, and quite well written, where the author makes an attempt at mapping out the IT revolution. The name of the book itself is interesting and somewhere an acknowledgement by the author that the rise of rediff.com was the fact of being at the right place at the right time…

The book is a part history of rediff.com and part author’s commentary on the rise of the internet. This is both the strength and weakness of the book, weakness because I picked-up the book or rather bought it online in the hope of knowing more about rediff, but felt let down, but then there are many nuggets of insights which the author shares on his perspective on the growth of internet and information technology.

Product Innovation for Indian Markets - LG Evercool Refrigerator

Wanted to share this ad many months back,when I first saw the ad...

Another example of Innovation for Indian consumers. For most of the tier-II city residents in the country this feature "Longest Cooling During Power Cut" makes a lot of sense...  

Emergence of New Product Categories in Grocery

Normally we assume that in grocery as a category one would not see many new categories emerge, but for the last couple of years or slightly more one can see at least 4-5 new categories emerge and become high growth categories..

The new categories are,

Oats

Green Tea

Olive oil

Frozen food (the likes of smiles….)

There seems to be two strong reasons for the emergence of these categories, one is the increasing health consciousness among the Indian consumers and second is the increasing presence of organized retail. The first factor heavily influences three out of the four categories, but the organized retail  impacts all the four, because for many of them some handholding is required which is easier in the organized retail domain rather the dominant mom-n-pop stores….

May be the category of energy drinks can also be added to the list….