Twitter Updates 18.07.09

have shifted most of market updates on to twitter, thought will update some of that to the blog,

• Casio India with its plans about India,http://tinyurl.com/lbwlso
• Restructuring at Godrej grp,http://tinyurl.com/no8747,i... strategy adopted for their not so popular brands, selling thru Futures Grp
• microsegmenting the Indian mobile telecom market,http://tinyurl.com/mo9sqs
• a new post on ries blog on demise of Dell,http://tinyurl.com/mx24a3
• One of the best marketing organizations in the country,http://www.amul.com/
• RT @chrisbrogan Tune Up Your Personal Message | chrisbrogan.comhttp://bit.ly/HRgOh
• RT @guykawasaki Why Twitter isn’t going anywhere: http://om.ly/?tiJ
• had a long chat with an Indian publisher on why It is almost next to impossible to replace Kotler's Marketing text book in India
• Reading: "How to make graphs that work" (http://twitthis.com/i56hgs)
• Google launches voice search in India, http://tinyurl.com/kp8esa
• Nano on the roads today!!! http://tinyurl.com/n2rdau
• RT@bhatnaturally Amul on the Bandra-Worli Sea Linkhttp://bit.ly/BYnvt good one
• KSRTC first to introduce Mercedes Benz buses,http://tinyurl.com/lmto63
• Nilekani and team to give unique numbers not cards,http://tinyurl.com/mfptug
• Indian mythological characters a hit in Indian gaming community,http://tinyurl.com/my4xht
• An observation, Mad Angles from Bingo and nimbooz are all derived from what we are used to consuming traditionally, so back to basics ?
• GuyKawasaki vidoe on art of innovation in 10 stepshttp://tinyurl.com/kl4rp8
• Santosh Desai on Hawai Chappal and its uniquely Indian feel,http://tinyurl.com/ms2bax
• Ginger Hotels a Tata group VFM hotel with Rs 1000 rent is being recast, would be interesting, http://www.gingerhotels.com
• PC sales down in India for the first time, http://tinyurl.com/lfca78
• RT@bhatnaturally 80 creative and well-designed logoshttp://bit.ly/6cO1g, real good ones
• At one end is sales force automation, but one has to see the bundle of papers which a sales person booking order at a chemist carrys
• creativity and coca cola in today's brand equityhttp://tinyurl.com/ndvqmm
• read the post on Duarte's blog http://tinyurl.com/kuzg6n and then the article in nytime, http://tinyurl.com/mvogsg agree it is fantastic
• RT@rohitbhargava , reading the latest post on 6 lessons from best mkg campaigns ever, http://tinyurl.com/m82jbj
• Horlicks and brand extensions, http://tinyurl.com/lnnwzk
• A write-up on ITC's Food Division and how it grown on to become a 2200 crore business in just 8 yrs http://tinyurl.com/lqk6hn
• Fruit bevergae companies experiementing with microsites & other online initiatives, ex http://www.mangoslice.com/
• Arun Maira in ET on delivery of public services,http://tinyurl.com/lrm4w7

Difficulty with service delivery

I have written earlier on the kind of service we are used to getting in India, and the saga sort of continues. One can listen to frequent horror stories of how a customer gets treated in Shopper's Stop when he wants to exchange a shoe which he bought a couple of days back. The typical service levels at our banks are again not something which one would actually want to talk about, and obviously it is not just the public sector ones which excel at that.

In this context I would like to relate a service experience albiet a positive one for a change. This happened with one of my friends when he went to get his car serviced. He went for his regular service and was not happy with the service gave his feedback to the company complaining about the tardy service which he got without expecting much to happen, but to his surprise within a matter of a few days he had people from the company, the dealer rushing to him with apologies and gifts. At the end he was more surprised than happy with the experience and was wondering what had happened to our service standards, have they really changed...

Though we tend to acknowledge the fact that because services are people driven there would be a lot of variation in the levels of service being delivered, but one has to experience that to realise how critical it can be as happened with us in our recent trip to uttranchal. We spend close to eighth days across four rest houses of KMVN ( a government tourist facility) and found the behaviour and how helpful the front desk people where at the place made a lot of difference to your overall experience at that destination and you also come up the conclusion that some people are stuck with a job (service job) which they should have never come to in the first place...............

"Meetha" Cadbury Dairy Milk and "Thanda" Coca Cola

The latest series of ads of Cadbury show the context of pay day and eating of Cadbury Dairy Milk. A visit to their web page gives us some idea of the thought behind the campaign.

Directly from the website - Sanjay Purohit, Executive Director - Marketing, Cadbury India Ltd said, “This new campaign takes the concept of celebrations to yet another level. With Pappu and Miss Palampur campaign, CDM created a space for itself during the big, community celebration moments. This commercial keeps the core promise of happiness while introducing another 'moment of joy' in one’s life. The new commercial highlights the celebratory occasion of payday, which is an important event in the life of every middle-class Indian.” For more visit Cadbury India.

The second ad or rather series of Ads which I found interesting is the Aamir Khan series of "Thanda Mathlab Coca Cola". Most of us would remember the series, both because of Aamir Khan and the good story lines behind the series. A link to one of ads for those who would like to refresh their memory, link.


The basic idea I felt behind both the campaigns is to go out and occupy a distinct space in the consumer's mind , and as has been said before if you are able to occupy a distinct space in the consumer's mind then it become very difficult for a competitor to dislodge you, the essence of positioning. And it might be easier done if one is able to capture a word in the consumer's mind which already exists , in the case of cadburys that word is "Meetha" a generic to represent all and any kind of sweet. Similary in the case of Coca-Cola the attempt to build an association with the word "Thanda" which means in common parlance any drink which is served cold , be it the ubiquitous lemon based Nimbu pani or a soft drink. The only problem with this approach is it is long term and one has to stick to the same message.

Rural Retail Options - Traditional Vs Emerging

Thought will share the presentation on rural retail options, over the last couple of years have shared the presentation with many students so thought might as well put it on slideshare to a wider audience,,

Rural Retail Options – Traditional Vs Emerging

View more documents from Rajesh Aithal.

Indian Car market morphing ???

Car market in India is going through rapid transformation, though the same can be said about many other sectors of the Indian economy, but then cars tend to attract more attention than others. In the last few months itself we have seen a slew of new launches by manufacturers, and the Indian consumer is spoilt for choice as he has never been before.

I will try to list the number of new cars which have been launched recently , starting with the obvious - Tata Nano which perhaps hogged most of the limelight, but then there were two new ones from Maruti Stable, Ritz and A-Star, and i20 from Hyundai. Honda Jazz and Fiat Grande Punto adding to the list in June. At the super premium end Land Cruiser by Toyota and Land Rover by Tata. One could also add Mahendra Xylo to the list . I personally have never seen these many launches in such a short period of time, so the scene is changing very rapidly, from the era of Ambassadors to Maruti 800 or Alto vs Santro to a more complex world....

One more observation which I have made is the sudden rise in interest among various car manufacturers to come out with alternate fuel (low-cost fuel) versions of various models. The LPG versions of various cars like Santro and Maruti WagonR, 800, spark make sense bu, but now we will soon have the option in premium cars also , like Toyota Corolla, SX4 , Skoda Octavia. Some food for thought on how Indian market differs , in the developed context maybe these would be seen as environment friendly and so on , but here it seen as option to reduce fuel cost.

One can see the various trends and changes in the car industry and obviously this is just the beginning ..............

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...