Back in the nineties, online communities organically grew around gaming, particularly around the gaming consoles from Sega, Nintendo and Sony. Users would spend hours discussing new games, hacks and tricks and gameplay for the most popular games of the day. Right from those days of Bulletin Board Services (BBS), Usenet newsgroups and IRC, consumer brands in general and Internet companies […]
We are sorry to interrupt our regular programming to bring you this special post on a few critical marketing lessons from Flipkart’s ‘Big Billion Day’ fiasco. In this post, we observe how the basic rules of services marketing and brand building were ignored in conducting Monday’s event. This surprises us, as we simultaneously acknowledge and appreciate the enormous time, money and […]
Do all brands have a personality? Do all of them need one? A brand personality is simply a set of human characteristics associated with a brand – think Virgin’s fun and irreverent personality vs British Airways’ warm, comforting albeit a staid one, or Johnson & Johnson as a nurturing and caring brand vs Harley Davidson’s rugged one. […]
It’s a paradox of our times that people still crave for a good read or a watch, even when they are drowning in the content deluge, especially online. Even as mainstream content consumption increasingly shifts to online from TV and print; the volume of new content being generated online and pushed out to people is […]
Here is a pro tip for all marketers planning their digital marketing strategy – maximise your attention on email marketing, while still glazing over social media marketing (SMM), in your overall mix. As antediluvian this suggestion may sound; conjuring up imaginary visions of thousands of frustrated users hitting the ‘Report spam’ in their inboxes at the sight of your next […]
The recent electoral victory of Narendra Modi-led BJP (as part of NDA) presents to us a good opportunity to understand a concept that is intuitively obvious to many, and yet is often ignored in commentary surrounding marketing and communications. Let’s call this concept the marketing composite, and see how it plays out. Modi’s campaign victory […]
As the 2014 Indian General Elections draw to a close, now is a good time as ever to apply the marketing lens to the electoral campaigns of the leading political parties and observe their communication strategies. Indeed, all political parties are forced to think as brand marketers when it comes to running electoral campaigns. They […]
The essence of marketing is to create and sell a product or service that better meets the needs of a set of people, for profit. The essence of brand building is to make a promise to this set of people – the targeted market – about the product or service’s features and benefits, and then […]
Will a spectacularly creative and memorable campaign help you sell a product that is decidedly poor value compared to other alternatives in its category? The short answer is yes. And the longer answer, as always, is a little more nuanced. To answer this question conclusively, we need to first understand and make note of a […]
As social entities, organizations have an intrinsic need for effective communications. One of the best-known definitions of marketing places communications as the key link between the creation of value by a business on one end, and the delivery of this value to customers on the other. Customers are but one of the multiple stakeholders of […]