22.4.13
21.4.13
18.4.13
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By Boris Andre Gomes & Jagpreet Singh Sandhu
17.4.13
The Magic of Shopping Bags
Want to see a magic? Get up and go check your closet / kitchen /store to see how many Shopping bags you / your spouse / your mum /even your kids have saved. I can bet there are more than ten there - of various sizes, substrate and brands. Right?
We saved them when they were free. We save them more when we have to pay for them now.
We saved them when they were of polythene. We save them more now that they are of recycled paper, jute or cloth. And we will continue to do that.
Earlier they were saved more due to their utility, now the Shopping bag you carry also speaks of your lifestyle. Case in point, attached picture. A colleague who prefers to bring in a heavily taped Ralph Loren shopping bag against a non-taped bag of any other lesser brand.
In fact I did a dipstick in our office and of the 13 bags, six were international brands (Da Millano, Zara, Harrods, Benetton, Vero Moda, SunGlass Hut) and rest strong Indian brands with distinct personality (Cotton World, Le 15 Patisserie, Forest Essential, Fab India) Of course the reasons were varied “such good material” “the size is perfect for my stuff” “I like the colour” but we all know the “real” reason – the brand name on the Shopping bag adds to your self-worth and perception. After all, today you ARE, what (where) you SHOP!
Then look at what they do for the Brand itself.
- They are the brand ambassadors post purchase. We all remember, at least the ladies do, the shopping bags carried by Carrie Bradshaw and friends in S&C.
- They travel all over the city, sometimes to places where the brand can never reach.
- They are in the consumer homes long after the main packaging is gone, offering constant reminder
The shopping bag should tell you what is really important for the brand. The West is totally tuned in to the importance of that. Some iconic luxury brands - like the Brown Bag, which have represented Bloomingdale’s for almost four decades as eternally relevant to the times , Desigual shopping bags which reflect the intense prints and flamboyant colours of the brand or Bergdorf Goodman’s iconic lavender shopping bags which mirror the uber luxury quotient of the store and so many others- have further established themselves through their shopping bags. 
Shopping bags have magical powers: for the consumer - it flaunts an aspect of consumer’s personality to the world. And for the brand – showcases a facet of their essence that is visible even when the product is not being used. Respect the magic!!
V.P Marketing
13.4.13
In a new bottle
Business Standard, Monday, April 1, 2013
The old paradigm of business - where manufacturers produced, marketers relayed product messages, consumers listened and sales followed naturally - has crumbled. It has given way to an economy where consumers co-create with manufacturers, marketing stands for two-way interactions, and made-for-the-customer offerings zip into the marketplace bypassing traditional channels, using platforms unheard of even a few years ago.
The old paradigm of business - where manufacturers produced, marketers relayed product messages, consumers listened and sales followed naturally - has crumbled. It has given way to an economy where consumers co-create with manufacturers, marketing stands for two-way interactions, and made-for-the-customer offerings zip into the marketplace bypassing traditional channels, using platforms unheard of even a few years ago.
10.4.13
Frooti gears to move to its next phase of growth with new commercial
The Economic Times, Wednesday, 03 April 2013
For those who have seen it carefully, the new brand campaign for Frooti reveals a subtle shift. It shows the newly signed brand ambassador Shahrukh Khan glugging the mango drink from a PET bottle, rather than a tetra pack, which is no longer as respected as it used to be and which also made Frooti most instantly identifiable when it was launched for the first time.
The Rs 1500 crore brand is ready to move to its next phase of growth, in a world filled with competitors like Coca-Cola's Maaza and PepsiCo's Slice on the one hand and carbonated beverages on the other. For instance getting on board one of the most recognised faces is being touted as the game changer for the 27-year old homegrown brand considering it has never resorted to getting a celebrity endorser before.
Feels marketing consultant Harish Bijoor, "Frooti's big strength is the fact that it has been around for donkey's years. It has become generic to the category altogether." This is a strength and a weakness as well, in his view, which the brand has to manage swiftly and carefully.
Nadia Chauhan Kurup, MD and CMO, Parle Agro agrees that the biggest challenge has been to get the magic back for a brand as old as Frooti. It's trying to combat some part of that challenge by getting the recognised face of Shahrukh Khan onboard. Frooti seems to be the last in the race to join the celeb-band wagon: the other players in the mango beverage space already have their ambassadors: Maaza features the pranks of Imran Khan and Parineeti Chopra while Slice has Katrina Kaif 's sensuous Aam Sutra moves.
The recent commercial shows a bunch of kids in a football field watching Shahrukh Khan gulping Frooti. He looks around when he is done and what he sees is a bunch of young adults whose longing for Frooti apparently has them lapse into a childlike state of wonder. He simply asks them 'what?' which snaps their reverie.
Shares Sajan Raj Kurup, founder and creative chairman, Creativeland Asia, "One of the key tasks in the brief was to capture the feel of relishing a bottle of Frooti and up the appetite quotient for the beverage." Even as the initial thoughts read more like 'oh no not again', Kurup wanted to create drool value purely through human emotions, reactions and expressions. Prakash Varma of Nirvana Films has directed the film. The team was very clear on how to use the celeb power of Khan without letting the brand get ambushed.
Shares Nadia Chauhan Kurup, "The campaign is breaking not just the category clutter or the advertising clutter, but it is even breaking the celebrity endorsement clutter." It is not often that SRK has been used in such a way where the only dialogue he gets to mouth is 'what?'" she says. When asked if he charged any lesser because he was made to talk less, she grins and shares how she wishes that it worked like that in which case "we would have just kept him silent." According to Satbir Singh, managing partner & chief creative officer, Havas Worldwide, "The usually talkative SRK quietly polishing off a bottle of Frooti makes it stick. Most agency and marketing teams would have him mouth a hundred words in praise of the brand." Studies have shown that culturally, kids and women prefer mango drinks just as the core audience for cola/ caffeine drinks (Mountain Dew, Red Bull etc) is men.
Alpana Parida, president, DY Works feels that this campaign reaches out to all ages and appeals to the child in men, to kids themselves and certainly the mothers who are both shoppers and consumers.It lifts the humble Frooti from a kiddie realm and will probably do more for the brand than all its past campaigns put together. According to Jitender Dabas, head of strategic planning, McCann Worldgroup, "A mango drink is about the pleasure of consuming mango and with this campaign Frooti seems to be coming back to its core." But is this the new positioning or just a commercial, is what he would like to know.
Along with the brand film, the marketing plan includes outdoors, BTL, mall activation, visibility at retail outlets (POP) and strong digital presence. Interestingly the first leg of this campaign was launched on the social media and as per Kurup in less than a week, its total timeline deliveries amounted to 52 million. It managed to garner over 8 million twitter handles and a whopping count of 80,000 tweets. Frooti's YouTube channel views increased by 2.5 million and subscribers increased by 600%.
Even as the brand spends 40% more on it's marketing this year compared to the last, it will have to quickly address one of its biggest weak spots — its relatively feeble presence in the returnable glass bottle (RGB) space. The returnable glass bottle is at the top in the pecking order of the caste system of packaging of soft drinks followed by the PET bottle and then the tetra pack at the bottom-rung, shares Bijoor.
This has been a pain-point that the brand is trying to tackle on a war-footing. Agrees and shares Nadia Chauhan Kurup, "Currently there are only four manufacturing plants for RGB which would eventually go up to 20 plants. The bottle form is one of the highest penetrated packing formats and there is a huge market for it." The glass bottle format has been launched in a phased way in some markets and would be increased soon as manufacturing capacity increases.
And perhaps that's what it will take for Frooti, the oldest brand in the category, to give a better account of itself in a growing market for mango beverages.
Alpana Parida is President of DY Works, a leading brand strategy and design firm.
For those who have seen it carefully, the new brand campaign for Frooti reveals a subtle shift. It shows the newly signed brand ambassador Shahrukh Khan glugging the mango drink from a PET bottle, rather than a tetra pack, which is no longer as respected as it used to be and which also made Frooti most instantly identifiable when it was launched for the first time.
The Rs 1500 crore brand is ready to move to its next phase of growth, in a world filled with competitors like Coca-Cola's Maaza and PepsiCo's Slice on the one hand and carbonated beverages on the other. For instance getting on board one of the most recognised faces is being touted as the game changer for the 27-year old homegrown brand considering it has never resorted to getting a celebrity endorser before.
Feels marketing consultant Harish Bijoor, "Frooti's big strength is the fact that it has been around for donkey's years. It has become generic to the category altogether." This is a strength and a weakness as well, in his view, which the brand has to manage swiftly and carefully.
Nadia Chauhan Kurup, MD and CMO, Parle Agro agrees that the biggest challenge has been to get the magic back for a brand as old as Frooti. It's trying to combat some part of that challenge by getting the recognised face of Shahrukh Khan onboard. Frooti seems to be the last in the race to join the celeb-band wagon: the other players in the mango beverage space already have their ambassadors: Maaza features the pranks of Imran Khan and Parineeti Chopra while Slice has Katrina Kaif 's sensuous Aam Sutra moves.
The recent commercial shows a bunch of kids in a football field watching Shahrukh Khan gulping Frooti. He looks around when he is done and what he sees is a bunch of young adults whose longing for Frooti apparently has them lapse into a childlike state of wonder. He simply asks them 'what?' which snaps their reverie.
Shares Sajan Raj Kurup, founder and creative chairman, Creativeland Asia, "One of the key tasks in the brief was to capture the feel of relishing a bottle of Frooti and up the appetite quotient for the beverage." Even as the initial thoughts read more like 'oh no not again', Kurup wanted to create drool value purely through human emotions, reactions and expressions. Prakash Varma of Nirvana Films has directed the film. The team was very clear on how to use the celeb power of Khan without letting the brand get ambushed.
Shares Nadia Chauhan Kurup, "The campaign is breaking not just the category clutter or the advertising clutter, but it is even breaking the celebrity endorsement clutter." It is not often that SRK has been used in such a way where the only dialogue he gets to mouth is 'what?'" she says. When asked if he charged any lesser because he was made to talk less, she grins and shares how she wishes that it worked like that in which case "we would have just kept him silent." According to Satbir Singh, managing partner & chief creative officer, Havas Worldwide, "The usually talkative SRK quietly polishing off a bottle of Frooti makes it stick. Most agency and marketing teams would have him mouth a hundred words in praise of the brand." Studies have shown that culturally, kids and women prefer mango drinks just as the core audience for cola/ caffeine drinks (Mountain Dew, Red Bull etc) is men.
Alpana Parida, president, DY Works feels that this campaign reaches out to all ages and appeals to the child in men, to kids themselves and certainly the mothers who are both shoppers and consumers.It lifts the humble Frooti from a kiddie realm and will probably do more for the brand than all its past campaigns put together. According to Jitender Dabas, head of strategic planning, McCann Worldgroup, "A mango drink is about the pleasure of consuming mango and with this campaign Frooti seems to be coming back to its core." But is this the new positioning or just a commercial, is what he would like to know.
Along with the brand film, the marketing plan includes outdoors, BTL, mall activation, visibility at retail outlets (POP) and strong digital presence. Interestingly the first leg of this campaign was launched on the social media and as per Kurup in less than a week, its total timeline deliveries amounted to 52 million. It managed to garner over 8 million twitter handles and a whopping count of 80,000 tweets. Frooti's YouTube channel views increased by 2.5 million and subscribers increased by 600%.
Even as the brand spends 40% more on it's marketing this year compared to the last, it will have to quickly address one of its biggest weak spots — its relatively feeble presence in the returnable glass bottle (RGB) space. The returnable glass bottle is at the top in the pecking order of the caste system of packaging of soft drinks followed by the PET bottle and then the tetra pack at the bottom-rung, shares Bijoor.
This has been a pain-point that the brand is trying to tackle on a war-footing. Agrees and shares Nadia Chauhan Kurup, "Currently there are only four manufacturing plants for RGB which would eventually go up to 20 plants. The bottle form is one of the highest penetrated packing formats and there is a huge market for it." The glass bottle format has been launched in a phased way in some markets and would be increased soon as manufacturing capacity increases.
And perhaps that's what it will take for Frooti, the oldest brand in the category, to give a better account of itself in a growing market for mango beverages.
Alpana Parida is President of DY Works, a leading brand strategy and design firm.
20.3.13
Why auto cos Mahindra & Mahindra and Honda name their products to ride on luck
The Economic Times, Thursday, 21 March 2013
With India Gate in the background, Anand Mahindra on Monday launched the e2o, pronounced Etwo-OH- taking a familiar path for the automobile maker with a penchant for names ending in O.
All of Mahindra's model names - whether it's the SUVs like Bolero, Scorpio, Xylo, or even the XUV 500, pronounced as five double oh, or the company's two-wheelers Duro, Rodeo, Stallio and Pantero have the same ending.
Pawan Goenka, president, automotive and farm equipment sector, Mahindra & Mahindra, says after the success of Bolero and Scorpio, the company thought the 'O' at the end of the vehicle was lucky and decided to stick with it.
"You can call it a bit of superstition, but it has worked for us. It has become a tradition for us and it is now an expectation from M&M to follow that practice. Thanks to this, people easily identify an M&M product," Goenka said.
While it is a conscious decision on part of M&M, Japan's largest two-wheeler maker, Honda Motorcycle and Scooters IndiaBSE -4.88 % (HMSI) stumbled into ending all its product names with "er". Honda's motorcycles all have seven-letter names — Twister, Stunner, Dazzler, and it will soon launch a 150 cc motorcycle called Trigger.
Brand experts say having a structured nomenclature system for a portfolio is a good strategy for automakers and it helps companies reduce its marketing spend.
"Having synchronicity in a way the brand names are pronounced makes it easier to remember. M&M's product names are easily identifiable and remembered over different sounding brands of say a company like Ford. But I am not too sure, if it is a good strategy to apply the same in two-wheelers as well," said Alpana Parida, president at DY Works, a leading brand consultancy.
Interestingly, for HMSI, the non-ER ending products like Activa, Shine and UnicornBSE 0.00 % are all successful models, and contribute a major part of volumes.
And some people associated with Honda have suggested that the company switch from an "er" ending to names that end with "a" - citing the Activa's success as support.
Yadvinder Singh Guleria, VP sales and marketing, Honda Motorcycle and Scooters India, says it's just a co-incidence that so many Honda vehicles have the same sound. "It's the ultimate dream for a marketer to have one brand identified as the entire category — like we did with Activa in the automatic Scooter space. Names are decided based on the characteristics of a vehicle, it should sound easy and should not have a negative connotation in any language," he added.
With over a thousand model names in the Indian personal vehicle space, and 50-60 new models launching every year, finding a brand name that breaks the clutter is extremely tough. Brand consultant Harish Bijoor says naming auto brands is a mix of logic and neuroscience.
"It is an industry where product is forever on the move, so one should have actionoriented names. Companies need to build in ubiquity and emotional value to the brand. MarutiBSE -0.53 % is the only one that has managed to build it and Mahindra is moving in that direction," Bijoor feels.
He also feels that anything ending with an 'O' is easy on the tongue and two-syllable, four-letter names are the best.
Alpana Parida is President of DY Works, a leading brand strategy and design firm.
With India Gate in the background, Anand Mahindra on Monday launched the e2o, pronounced Etwo-OH- taking a familiar path for the automobile maker with a penchant for names ending in O.
All of Mahindra's model names - whether it's the SUVs like Bolero, Scorpio, Xylo, or even the XUV 500, pronounced as five double oh, or the company's two-wheelers Duro, Rodeo, Stallio and Pantero have the same ending.
Pawan Goenka, president, automotive and farm equipment sector, Mahindra & Mahindra, says after the success of Bolero and Scorpio, the company thought the 'O' at the end of the vehicle was lucky and decided to stick with it.
"You can call it a bit of superstition, but it has worked for us. It has become a tradition for us and it is now an expectation from M&M to follow that practice. Thanks to this, people easily identify an M&M product," Goenka said.
While it is a conscious decision on part of M&M, Japan's largest two-wheeler maker, Honda Motorcycle and Scooters IndiaBSE -4.88 % (HMSI) stumbled into ending all its product names with "er". Honda's motorcycles all have seven-letter names — Twister, Stunner, Dazzler, and it will soon launch a 150 cc motorcycle called Trigger.
Brand experts say having a structured nomenclature system for a portfolio is a good strategy for automakers and it helps companies reduce its marketing spend.
"Having synchronicity in a way the brand names are pronounced makes it easier to remember. M&M's product names are easily identifiable and remembered over different sounding brands of say a company like Ford. But I am not too sure, if it is a good strategy to apply the same in two-wheelers as well," said Alpana Parida, president at DY Works, a leading brand consultancy.
Interestingly, for HMSI, the non-ER ending products like Activa, Shine and UnicornBSE 0.00 % are all successful models, and contribute a major part of volumes.
And some people associated with Honda have suggested that the company switch from an "er" ending to names that end with "a" - citing the Activa's success as support.
Yadvinder Singh Guleria, VP sales and marketing, Honda Motorcycle and Scooters India, says it's just a co-incidence that so many Honda vehicles have the same sound. "It's the ultimate dream for a marketer to have one brand identified as the entire category — like we did with Activa in the automatic Scooter space. Names are decided based on the characteristics of a vehicle, it should sound easy and should not have a negative connotation in any language," he added.
With over a thousand model names in the Indian personal vehicle space, and 50-60 new models launching every year, finding a brand name that breaks the clutter is extremely tough. Brand consultant Harish Bijoor says naming auto brands is a mix of logic and neuroscience.
"It is an industry where product is forever on the move, so one should have actionoriented names. Companies need to build in ubiquity and emotional value to the brand. MarutiBSE -0.53 % is the only one that has managed to build it and Mahindra is moving in that direction," Bijoor feels.
He also feels that anything ending with an 'O' is easy on the tongue and two-syllable, four-letter names are the best.
Alpana Parida is President of DY Works, a leading brand strategy and design firm.
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