Luxury Jeans - A Cross Over Canvas

They sound like two ends of the scale! Therefore, I was curious to read this India Today article(Feb 19 issue) under Society & Arts fashion.

Like elsewhere in the world, India is ready for designer jeans. Looks like the days of jeans-as-only-workwear is fast getting over! Even though, most people still care less about the label and more about the fit!

Even Indian designers are fast catching the luxury jeans band-wagon.

Rocky S, the Mumbai designer was the first to launch a jeans label Rocky S in 2002.
Designer Arjun Khanna's - 'Rockstar in Morocco' was a success!
Though even now, only a very small section of the buyers can afford to shell out 8K or more for luxury jeans.

Levis has its own Diva line endorsed by Sushmita Sen and the Redwire DLX jeans that are iPod compatible. There are also talks of a Levis-Manish Arora collection...

Wrangler has it's own 'John Abrahan by Wrangler' collection at the top end.

Designer Narendra Kumar Ahmed is set to showcase his signature jeans at the Lakme Fashion Week in March.

Then there is the Sevens brand detailed in Swarovski and the Jap-gone-global brand Evisu's hand painted jeans and stuff from Diesel!

I guess 'Luxury Jeans' would be yet another example of 'Massclusivity' - the marriage of 'mass' and 'exclusivity'!
I also feel jeans is the perfect canvas for cross-over adventures in India where...
East meets West
Denim meets Designer
Casual meets Party-wear
Blue/ Mostly White-collar meets Pink/No-collar
Ubiquity meets Fashion/style statement

Luxury jeans(and its various mutants/ avatars) would see an increasing rise in popularity as it would also in a way fall in the category of 'personalised' stuff. The growing digital, connected and participative world loves 'personalised' themes - be it a $20,000 car or a blog or a 'personalised' jeans!

And therefore I think the timeless blue denim has once again re-invented itself for the next decade!

Or am I reading too much:-)

PS. Images sourced from gettyimages.com & India Today

Flash Brands. Flash Thoughts

Like most of us, I have been privy to the out-of-work Bollywood actor Shilpi Shetty's bizarre turn-around in fortunes through the British reality show Big Brother! It's been a 100m sprint towards famedom for Shilpa...

From 'nowhere' to 'everywhere'
From relative joblessness to a flood of Bollywood offers(a report said 74!!)
From a 2nd rung Bollywood star to an 'overnight diva'
From an ill-dressed actor to an icon of 'fusion clothing'
From a 'dumb bimbette' to an 'Indian Icon'(of course debatable and with large dollops of media frenzy!)

Over the last 12 months, I have viewed few such Flash Brands, built solely by media who rise to prominence and share of mind and then fade away. But while they last they are a brand no less!

Some other flash brands( if I can say so) would be 'Prince'(the Haryana boy who fell in a hole and shot to national recognition, Budhia, the Orissa marathon kid who generated TRPs for close to a month for all the Indian news channels and of course Laxmi Niwas Mittal...

Unlike Shilpa, of course, Prince and Budhia did not generate commercial opportunities(at least I am not aware of). Was wondering if there could be a science/ art of the flash brand. In our attention-deficit world, can we create them...Or do flash brands happen only by chance?

I think flash brands might have the following traits...
1. They have a strong topical core. In the case of Shilpa it was 'Resurgent Indian Pride'. More about it here. Budhia = Super Kid Archetype...

2. Built by PR and media reportage and not by advertising.

3. Largely unpredictable. But the flash-timing has to be right. The media must be relatively free to build stories and feed the public. So. flash brands are unlikely to be created in the week preceding KBC's launch or the Union Budget week:-)

4. Indian Flash brands(Shilpa, Budhia, Prince, LN Mittal...) in the recent past have mostly been human. As opposed to the Western/ Japanese ones - Harry Potter(a fictional character), Rubiks Cube, Pokemon, Sudoku!!

5. Flash brands generally follow a story, a quick trajectory of facts, fiction and spice...They ride on a wave of media frenzy and 360 merchandise(Harry Potter, Sudoku)

6. While the origin of a flash brand might be serendipitous, it needs sustained interest by media to keep it going through its relatively short shelf-life...


7. Flash brands might happen with greater frequency today. In the digital age, with the democratisation of technology tools and creative expression, if a flash brand core has an appeal, it encourages an active participation from the masses rather than a passive, push-only communication strategy of most conventional brands...

Would love to hear of more examples, counter-views, other flash brand traits...

Mishraji Ki Baatein

Subhash K Jha in one of his film reviews had said about HAZAARON KHWAISHEIN AISI - "HKA has been Sudhir Mishra's most complex ambitious and politically driven film to date. He minces no words while castigating the Nehruvian "ideal" that modern India adopted, a model for governance that generated a social order that's unjust and degenerate.

Subsuming the murky and incoherent politics of Kolkata, Delhi and the Bhojpur district of Bihar between the decadent decade that falls between 1969 and 1977, HKA takes us on a strange stirring and reverberant journey into the erosion of the collective conscience in modern India."

Post HKA, I have always waited to hear and read more about Mishraji. Found this interview of his on PassionforCinema.com...

Loved some of the nuggets from his rant...

1. "Every time you make a film it is a humiliating experience for me - within myself, because you have a notion of yourself and every time you feel you will be caught out this time. There’s so much mediocrity that comes out from within us. And every time you begin a film and you try to write, the first draft is so bad."

2. "Don’t make what the marketers tell you to make. Make something that you want to make and then market it."

3. "In the 1986 World cup Gary Lineker scored the most number of goals. So, they asked Gary Lineker, who scores the maximum number of goals. Is it the person who is at the right place at the right time? He said, “No…You have to be in the right place all the time. Then, sometimes the ball comes to you.”

4. "Do I think these times are any better for Indian filmmaking? This is again a very stupid notion. A notion born out of illiteracy. ‘What is the past is not necessarily a classic, what is the present, is not necessarily modern."

5. "Today, again young people say that we are changing. C’mon, every one was modern according to their time. So Guru Dutt was modern according to his time and hopefully somebody will be modern according to our time. The best films are those that cross time. The only way to know what was a good film is twenty years after it was made."

The planner in me is often searching for unique Indian voices. I find Sudhir Mishra to be one of them!

Nike Just Did It

Meraj mailed me this link in the morning...My guess is by now everybody in the media/ advertising space might have seen this video/ TVC/ viral...whatever!

Loved it...Neo loved it although he was upset why the boys were playing on the top of the bus:-) Bus toot jayega he said!!

I never was a great connoisseur of the game of cricket...Past few years, my interest has dwindled even further...But this video in a strange way romanticises the game for me...

It's got scale, its ambitious...and it captures the din and chaos of an Indian city and street cricket so charmingly well. Yet is Nike in its character and execution!

Now who did this film??

Webchutney Knows To Viral

This is perhaps the second kick-ass viral video from Webchutneyin the past 2 months or so! Check it out...

Webchutney has been rated by Business Today as one of the coolest companies in India!Here are some pix from it's 'jobs@webchutney' page!!

Shubh Vivaah : Media Planning & Account Planning

Today's Brand Equity carries an article by Ravi Balakrishnan on CCP(Consumer Context Planning) which looks like an attempted arranged marriage between Media Planning and Account Planning.

Media unbundling happened over the last decade in India. As somebody who has worked in the pre and post bundling era, I feel after the initial efficiencies of scale and cost benefits, the unbundling has pinched us all.

- The creative agency/ people lacks the much needed media perspective!

- The media agency has over the years often exhibited a trading house behaviour. The unit of creativity is traded like a commodity. Of course in the recent past, things are taking a positive turn...

- The clients have saved big money in the short run but now are gasping for a better engagement model.

Ravi Kiran(can't trace his blog), the diminutive but utterly dynamic CEO of Starcom South Asia elaborated on CCP:

1. An obsessive focus on rarely asked questions(by whom:-)

2. Partnering with academia in the fields of social sciences, psychology and anthropology.

3. Consumer panels which track not just brand choice, but also give insights into nascent trends.

4. 'Living with People' - an ethnographic study that has the CCP team spend time in people's home...being an unobtrusive observer of behaviour...

5. CCP aims to make the different disciplines work in a more seamless manner.
and the boldest of them all 6. CCP plans to work with parts of the creative industry that are more open to collaborations - be it in editorial content and programming!

Thanks Ravi, we need more guys like you...How about writing a post on this subject on your blog!

Is Being Discontented Such A Bad thing?

As a child or even now, when I bend down to touch my Nana/Nani's feet or my parents or elders, they say - "Khush Raho"(Be happy). That's the Indian way!(the actual words might be different depending on which region you belong to)...

Yet, I remember a long chat I had with a cousin of mine(Gopal Bhaiya) late one winter night in Delhi around the subject that increasingly despite all the blessings:-) we are a little discontented all the time.

How the moment I/we reach a personal goal, the goal ever so quietly shifts further away! And here I am not referring to the discontent of not having the bigger flat or the car or a fatter pay cheque...

We were just referring to the fact that a better job, a promotion, an achievement at work, writing an article/ making a presentation that everyone appreciates no longer gives the same amount of happiness which a similar/ lesser accomplishment would have given a decade or two back. But more importantly the duration of happiness for that particular activity also shrinks all the time!!

I think I felt happier when I won the first prize in elocution at my school than when I got a big raise some time back...

A long summer spent at my Nnani's place gave me greater joy than a business/ pleasure trip to beautiful Cambodia recently.

I suspect part of it can be explained by the 'nostalgia hue' with which we paint the past and selectively remember/ amplify the good things!

Anyways, that chat with Gopal Bhaiya didn't have many answers....And the Qs keep swirling at the back of mind. Until few moments ago when I was reading an article by Paul Graham(the writer). He has a nice point point to make on 'It's okay to be discontented'..

Paul Graham - "To me it was a relief just to realize it might be ok to be discontented. The idea that a successful person should be happy has thousands of years of momentum behind it. If I was any good, why didn't I have the easy confidence winners are supposed to have? But that, I now believe, is like a runner asking "If I'm such a good athlete, why do I feel so tired?" Good runners still get tired; they just get tired at higher speeds.

People whose work is to invent or discover things are in the same position as the runner. There's no way for them to do the best they can, because there's no limit to what they could do. The closest you can come is to compare yourself to other people. But the better you do, the less this matters. An undergrad who gets something published feels like a star. But for someone at the top of the field, what's the test of doing well? Runners can at least compare themselves to others doing exactly the same thing; if you win an Olympic gold medal, you can be fairly content, even if you think you could have run a bit faster. But what is a novelist to do?"

Thanks Paul for the wise words...So being a little discontented all the time ain't such a bad thing after all...As I keep discovering all the time, most things in life follow the AND rule and not the tyranny of OR!

So actually I feel I am happy and discontented and not happy or discontented as I thought...Hope I am making sense...

Sailing with the Wind

My colleague David from our Tokyo office forwarded this quote of author Paul Graham which appears in “The Long Tail”

“The Web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it. That’s why their success seems so effortless. They’re sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels."

"Google doesn’t try to force things to happen their way. They try to figure out what’s going to happen, and arrange to be standing their when it does.”

What a wonderful reading of the times we live in. Indeed it appears that

1. Sailing with the wind > Rowing aggressively in a fixed direction
2. Inventing the future > Predicting the future

Google sails and therefore gets it more often...Hey, anyone has links to any interviews with the legends - Lary Page & Sergey Brin!

Sense in Nonsense

One of the harmless, humble oft-neglected skills that I have is that of rhyming and making-up nonsense lyrics:-) Looks like I have inherited this skill(if I may say) from my father who does a lot of tukbandi and who though retired as a history professor could have done quite well as an ad agency copy-writer!

Though I don't feel motivated to write this nonsense verse bit often enough, I have promised myself to do one entire book for my son Neo. When I jogged my memory my magnum nonsense verse was written during my engineering days as a 'rebellion against mess food' against a certain warden called 'Yadav' at REC Surat!. Unfortunately among umpteen cities and house shifts have misplaced the said 'nonsense script'. Pity!

Anyways, this subject of nonsense verse popped up in my head as I sifted through a book review by Mitali Saran of IE. The said book is The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense! Edited by Michael Heyman, Sumanyu Satpathy and Anushka Ravishankar and brought out by Penguin.

Mitali says - The Tenth Rasa is a landmark anthology of Indian nonsense from Kabir to the present-day, a sort of stylistic, temporal, and geographic sampler of one of India's most marginalised forms of creativity.

Gleanings from Mitali's review:

1. It was Tagore who pointed out that the nine rasas of classical Indian aesthetic theory ignored what he called baalras, which was nevertheless everywhere in the joyful, nonsensical, traditional Bengali nursery rhymes called chhoda.

2. Sukumar Ray(father of Satyajit Ray) described this tenth rasa as the rasa of whimsy - a passable translation of kheyaal. Ray, writing in the wake of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, rescued the idea of nonsense from the nursery and the margins of hasya ras, elevating it to the status of a serious and complex game...

3. The book talks about the universal pleasurableness of nonsense, the joyousness and the play that it involves; about India's heritage of nonsense, in folk traditions like ulti bhasha and abol tabol.

4. It talks about how something can be meaningful even as it is meaningless, and differentiates jokes, which makes sense from nonsense, which does not. It also talks of the subversiveness of the nonsense genre, which can, like the court jester, get away with murder while playing the fool.

Sample this verse from the book - Idli lost its fiddli/ Dosa lost its crown/ Wada lost its wiolin/ And let the whole band down.:-)

And this one by the maestro Sukumar Ray's Glibberish-Gibberish"...

Come happy fool whimsical cool
Come dreaming dancing fancy-free,
Come mad musician glad glusician
Beating your drum with glee

I wonder if a brand can take this space and craft a small niche! Meanwhile must lay my hands on the Tenth Rasa...

SchoolOfDavid : Open Source Learning

About six months back, at our small agency we started a learning program called SchoolOfDavid. We/I haven't been very regular but yesterday managed the 4th such session.

As always it was fun! This time it was different in two refreshing ways.
(a) It happened outside the agency, at my place and Candies - the quiet little eatery in Bandra! and (b) It had a truly diverse gene/talent pool...

One of the structural changes I have been passionate about in the agency is the formal partnership between the creative and the other guys(planner/ servicing). As against the norm of a department-led-silo-thinking/working! The topic of this session was 'Dinking' and was about the need to do 'boundaryless-thinking-n-action!

After a short gyan session by me, we got down to a role playing exercise loosely based on Edward De Bono's role playing exercises...

We had 3 teams. Each took on the role of a new company - M&M and Google(X2) and then went on creating a new agency...

I wasn't at all surprised at the strategic-n-creative spark of the young turks in my agency. I have tapped into it many-a-time this last one year! What they may lack in experience, they more than make up in sheer 'fresh-n-bold thinking'!

Some other musings:
1. We must tap into the 'talent pool' at the bottom of the pyramid more often...Fresh pairs of eyes is stupid to ignore!

2. Open-source problem solving can work wonders. In the past month, I have used it to create a campaign for a major client of ours! If the people at the top are committed, open-source-working is not very difficult to DO.

3. Informal sessions create culture. Formal ones don't.

4. To quote Yogi Berra - "You can observe a lot, just by watching."

5. I find in the digital age that we live in, 'worldviews'/ 'experience' is not directly proportional to age...

6. A remarkable way forward might be to create a 'shadow board' of young guys to get in the freshest ideas on board.

7. How you do the learning sessions is as important as what you do in them.

In case anybody is interested in conducting informal work-shops to create a 'creative play-ground' in their organisations, please feel free to get in touch with me!

cheers
M\
P.S. A special thanks to Russell(without whom SOD4 would have been highly unlikely)for baby-sitting young Neo!!

Murthy and Premji Over Breakfast

Mayank was kind enough to forward this link of the conversation between Narayan Murthy and Azim Premji arranged by ET. Like most Indians, am in awe of these two gentlemen who have transformed brand India over the years!

Some nuggets from this interview!

1. Premji - "Our experience as a company is that if your top management is not global, they tend to collect people who are of the same kin. It is the most difficult transformation."

Murthy - "What is a global mindset? It is about thinking of the whole world as your arena, being comfortable in interacting with people from multiple cultures, looking at the various markets while strategising, leveraging talent from all cultures, making sure that all cultures are comfortable in your milieu and that you have a fair representation of different cultures."

2. Murthy on the Tata-Corus deal - "When somebody writes the business history of India in the 2000s and 2100s, this will be described as a turning point in the history of the mindset of the Indian entrepreneur. That's what I'm excited about!"

3. Murthy on business then - "In 1981, when we founded Infosys, we were very clear from day one that we had to be focused on global markets. That was a tough exercise because the friction to business was extremely high then."

"It would take two to three years and 50 visits to Delhi to get a license to import a computer. We had to wait in front of the Reserve Bank of India for 10 days to travel abroad once. It was almost impossible to open offices abroad or get a consultant in marketing or in quality because there were severe restrictions on what you could pay them."

4. Murthy on Azim - "First of all, Azim is the least pretentious person. For example, he would call me once in a while and say, Murthy I want to meet you. I would say, look I'll get back to you when I am free and he would say, don't worry I'll talk to Pandu. Look, it is the chairman of Wipro who says he will speak to my secretary."

5. Premji on relationship with competition - "Relationships are getting multifaceted. As an example, we find that we are able to work with IBM mutually globally and we compete with them like hell in India. Particularly on large projects, we are competing all the time. At the same time, there is mutual collaboration and mutual competition."

6. Premji on China - "It’s both friends and foe. They are friends because we see them as part of our global delivery model. We see them downstream as a potential market like they see us as a downstream potential market. Their threat is because they are trying to emulate the India global delivery model in services and they will compete with us."

Okay, go ahead read the interview...Goes without saying, when the history of the great Indian awakening will be written, these two software titans would have a chapter each for their vision, innovativeness, courage and high ethical standards!

Wiki Woman, if that's the way it must be, okay...

Read a small article in HT some days back about the new boss at Wikipedia - Florence Devouard...Everything about her company and her job is pretty new-age!!

1. She runs her office not from NY, London, Hongkong or Shanghai but from a village in central France.

2. Her company - the Wikimedia Foundation in it's present avatar came into being as recently as June 20, 2003! Yet in a crazily short span of 4 years, last month it was voted among the world's 5 most influential brands!! No ads. Pure sampling and co-creation brand!

3. Florence's corporate climb(if we can call it corporate or climb) is equally fascinating...
Her first contact with Wikipedia was in 2001, when it was still a fledgling org.!

She started editing entries on genetically modified organisms and was gradually drawn into the community of volunteer editors...

Pretty soon, she started focussing on internal organisation rather than writing/ editing articles. 3 years later, she was elected to the Wikimedia Foundation board.

And last summer it was agreed that she would step into the shoes of the founder Jimmy Wales, as Chairperson!

4. She is a woman with 3 kids, who works from home in a village and heads among the world's most influential brands. All in 6 short years!

This is a really different world. A world my father can't even dream about. A world my MBA never cautioned me about!! But a world that gets bloody exciting every single day:-)

A world shaped by technology, possibility, serendipity and collaboration...

Organisations like Wikimedia are...

More concepts than companies
More collaboration than hierarchy
More content-driven than products/ services driven
More open-source than closed looped
More virtual than physical
More about volunteers than about employees
More hyborg(hybrid organisations) than anything we have previously known

But if that's the way, it must be okay...

Image sourced from Pixelache

15% More Insights on Love Marketing. Hurry!

Yet another 'diary-page' from a young(er) friend of mine!

Super Duper Hype.. but its become a huge marketing endeavour every year.. specially since last few years...from greeting card companies to cell phone companies, to even banks use this occasion!

i came across this while i was googling - HDFC is offering a new variant of Gold Bar - an attractively priced 2.5 gm Heart-shaped Gold Bar.
HDFC Bank Credit Card holders would enjoy one per cent cash back on every 2.5 gm Heart shaped Gold Bar, bought by swiping their credit card!

Valentines day till a few years back, i didn't even know, but by the time i was passing out of school which was about 8 years back... it had started catching up big time at the archies and hallmark level.. now i think it has crossed all boundaries...

i saw the hutch hoarding at bandra with pink heart shaped balloons all over - i think was for downloading lovey ring tones or something for valentines.. i personally wanted to puke..

valentines is not just about lovers.. its about LOVE across genders across age and across relationships but unfortunately the marketing has stuck to focussing on lovey couples and it begins and ends at that.. hotels have special dinner meal offers and parties.. its anywhere and everywhere and u just cant miss it...

personally valentine is just another day in the year and it is bloody annoying wen people have to find a day to make it gooey and say things to their girlfriends or boyfriends.. in anycase in a city like bombay u mite tend to feel left out because the hype is so bloody much and people are so for it that u cant avoid it..

the reason why valentines so big here i think is solely because of the mad marketing because and the media hype around it within the country because otherwise its not such a mad thing abroad.. its big but people don't treat it stupidly.. i remember going out and catching a movie with my girlfriends (all of us single and no boyfriends to go out with he he)..this year i think will be going out for dinner with my girlfriends again.. ha ha.. lol!

thats about it.. i guess the media exposure and wanting to ape the western culture bit has gotten the people down to following such days including fathers day motherdays and blah blah.. these are undoubtedly great cashing days for various companies without doubt..

chalo nothing more that is coming to my mind..

Picture courtesy a colleague who was kind enough to model for indiadrant:-)

Gift Wrapped Love with 25% extra Romance!

The new India that the world loves to talk about is not just young. It's madly in love!
Or so the $65-90 mn that were spent around Valentine Day last year suggest. (The figure might be puny compared to global 'mush-market-index' but then our Valentine market is in nascency)...

Well, the decibel levels of v-marketing have risen dramatically this year. The day that stretched a week is now a full month. Pretty soon, we may have the Year of the Valentine!

There are more hearts per person in Bombay today. There are red-n-pink hearts everywhere and love messages on sms and buildings/ bill-boards wrapped with heart-shaped-balloons.

Of course, there is much money to be made from mush. But what nauseates me is the 'lowest-common-denominator' of love-communication. Looks like marketers and ad agencies are catering only to age 16, starry eyed kids. It's the dumbing down/ in-your-faceness of the Valentine communication and the cluttered shelf space of love that sucks!

Commerce > Romance.

Being on the other side of 30, I asked few of my young friends to pen down their feelings on V-Day marketing...for a better/ balanced perspective!

Here is a page from the diary of a young friend...She is young, very bright, very blunt. Definitely not a silent consumer(as they say, not me:-) of 'mush marketing'!

Love sells. It's as simple as that. If it didn't we wouldn't have so many jewelers selling diamonds on the anniversary gift concept. And guess what, it works! I mean I would never imagine a practical man like my father could buy my mom diamond earrings for their anniversary, but then again it was their 25th year and they love each other…so see what I mean, love sells because everyone seems to be so smitten by, well, love!

And now coming to Valentine's Day, that fateful day in the middle of the shortest month, it can also be identified as the biggest brand for love, its byproducts being cards, gifts, and other moronic lil pink n red objects floating about like chaos (ref. to ancient Greece where it was believed that chaos was the mixed matter the Universe was made up of before the Big Bang).

Wait a minute, I hope you don't think I'm another political party with an anti-love agenda, actually I'm quite mushy in my own right. What makes me queasy is the desperate search for a Valentine a week before Feb 14th.

This has now resulted in a phenomenon known as "the friendly Valentine". It starts with a Valentine'less' guy who just can't seem to find a chick no matter how much Axe he sprays all day long. He then uses his devious mind to come up with a plan to save face- ask one of your best friends! They'll never let you down. And even if they try to you can always say "yehi dosti, yehi pyaar???" Cheesy, I know, but works like a charm. Said best friend gets emotionally blackmailed and desperado has a date.

Another nauseating symptom of Valentine fever is overt displays of affection, a frantic search for the perfect gift with "to our eternal love" on the card. By the way, Webster's just called, they're changing the definition of eternal to "a time period equivalent to a month or in rare cases, a few more".

Let's get this straight, I don't mean don't celebrate your love or your "beautiful journey together". All I mean is that when the axe falls on it, we shouldn't find that the glue that held it all together was made of gift wrap paper and greeting cards.

Valentine's Day is not a competition for the best gift or the biggest bouquet. It's a day to celebrate the fact that every time your special someone calls and that assigned ring tone rings, you feel that tingly feeling waking every part of you, or every time you walk together in the rain, you feel your senses coming alive. No corporate firm can package that and sell it to you in a box. The same way, you can't buy love. So when are we going to stop trying?

Family is the New Friend

One of the great things about Indian culture is that we import stuff/ concepts/ lifestyles/ trends and almost always give a spin to it...

So, while elsewhere in the world, Friends might be the New Family, in India 'Family is the new Friend'. That's the verdict of a nation wide survey done by India Today-AC Nielson-ORG -Marg(browse the Feb 19,'07 issue)!

Have summarised some interesting facts and nuggets from the survey.

1. Parents become the new pal as young Indians, often transiting cities in pursuit of colleges and careers, seek emotional solace in the families they leave behind.

2. Family Longing. The percentage of people who would like to live in a joint family has gone up to 74% this year, from 68% in 2006!

3. For a generation that lives on take-aways, the uncertainty of blind dates/ speed dating/ divorce and constant job-hopping, stability doesn't come easy. Parents might be a convenience to have around, they might just be a mere sounding board or the last resort when everyone stands you up, but at least they are there. And that seems to be comfort enough.

4. Sociologist, Yogendra Singh, professor at JNU, says this reciprocity among India's youth, where the family is concerned, exists because parents in India are extremely supportive of their children, unlike in the West, where children are expected to be independent at a very early age. As a result, despite the influence of modernism, India's youth prefer to stick to family and traditional values...

And technology(be it the Internet or mobile or low cost airlines) is playing it's small role in keeping even the diasporic Indian family intact...

Where are the Wow-ers? And how do we hire them?

A mid-sized or small ad agency in India today generally doesn't have an HR department. Even if it does, the HR person is more a recruiter and administrator than a talent spotter and trainer!

As we lose our capacity/ intent to dole out fat salaries, We must think out-of-the- box to spot good talent, hire them, train them and then keep them excited!

And this is the duty of every senior/ mid-level manager in the agency. I often dig into Tom Peters for inspiration in such matters...

Here are some nuggets from his book'The Circle of Innovation'.

1. "Expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you are doing" - Steve Jobs
The original Macintosh team was a marvelous mix of artists and engineers. Their aesthetic interests were as strong as their techie interests! When was the last time, we tried creating/ fostering communities of interest in our agency?

2. "It's the cracked ones that let light into the world."
Are there enough wild guys in our agencies? Are we chatting/ having coffee/ inviting them to our agency? Often enough.

3. "Experience is out. Inexperience is in. It may make a lot of middle-aged businessmen very uncomfortable, but it's a fact of life." - Alan Webber, founding editor, Fast Company
Have you tried giving an important project to the junior most guys in your agency.
I tried recently for a major assignment. The results have been stunningly impressive!!

4. "Good ideas come from differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxta-positions. The best way to maximise differences is to mix ages, cultures and disciplines." - Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director, MIT Media Lab
Shall we attempt making small diads of copy-writer & planner, servicing and art director, CEO and management trainee, planning director and summer trainee...We may be surprised at the value we might create by this re-mixing!! Let's try creating hot-groups for new business pitches!

5. Hire for attitude. Train for skill.
Hire bright students from design institutes, history students, bio-tech students...Give them creative assignments...Woo them. Woo their colleges. Network with their faculty!
Let's raise the lust quotient of our agency...

As Andy Grove said, we need to create 'waves of lust' for our product - in this case our agency brand!

The wow-ers are unevenly distributed! Are we doing enough to hire them?

Image source : Gettyimages

P2P, Friemily, UnI. Call me anything but Consumer

Imagine if your visiting card said - Senior Producer. Or National Producer. Or Chief Producing Officer. Or Creative Producer. Or Art Producer. Or Market Research Producer.

The very thought is appalling!! And yet in the marketing/communication game of us vs them,we call the people who buy stuff/ experiences/ grocery/ dreams from us - 'consumers'.

I hate this term. Its so inhuman. So degrading. So wrong. So incomplete!

Then is an entire lexicon which we have created- consumer insight, consumer behaviour, consumer research, consumer loyalty...And the edifice of our thoughts, strategies and communication is built on it!

I feel nomenclatures shape our world/ worldview. Seemingly innocuous labelling affects perceptions, thoughts and behaviours...But stereotyping simplifies. And therefore as marketers and communicators, its easy to maintain the divide. Us and them. Producers( of products and communication) and consumers.

Implicit are the rules...
1. They are a target audience
2. We make the rules.
3. We are smarter than them
4. They are stationary targets
5. They are waiting for our products and communication
6. We learn about them. They do not learn about us.
7. They can be loyal to us, if only we tried harder.
8. They can always be grouped in clusters to suit our mass media weaponry.
9. We can change the packaging of our products. And they will fall for them.
10. They have an insatiable appetite for hype, half-truths and bull-shit.
11. If you pray hard. The remote will disappear! Or at least they won't use them that often
12. They love the sound of our voice...

But everyone knows...The rules have long changed.
1. We are the new target. Of disloyalty. Of cynicism. Of derision.
2. They are making most of the rules.
3. They are much smarter than us. They didn't even give us time to realise this:-)
4. They are moving fast. We are the targets
5. They are having fun with change and technology. And are saying to us - "Get a life".
6. They have learnt all our tricks. They can now even make a super bowl ad for $12!!
7. Hype and half-truths never gets loyalty. They are loyal to their families and communities and passions not to bars of soap and toilet paper! Not even to their companies(most of the time)
8. They are as fragmented as shards of broken glass
9. They are saying to us - "When will you change the packaging of your thoughts?"
10. They say to us - "Boy, when will you ever get it. Why are you guys so dumb?"
11. Who needs the remote to escape your ads...We don't watch TV. We watch TiVO.We get RSS feeds
12. They don't give a f*** to what we have to say(mostly)!!

In this open source bazaar of conversations, of people-generated-content, a world with zero tolerance for hype and falsehood, we must find a new word for 'Consumer'. They are exactly like us. They are Us. We are them. People who work during the day and surf at night:-) People with families and stress, kids and budgets.

They are not on this earth to consume. They want authenticity. They want trust. They want to protect the earth and keep it green. They want to laugh and joke. Their loyalties can never be bought with a card. Yes they want discounts;they want 'beautiful images' but that doesn't define them.

They read many of the articles on 'how to capture eye-balls', how to capture a share of the target audience. And then they trust us even less. They shrug their shoulders. Because we don't get it! Even now.

So if they are us. Should we call this bazaar conversation P2P(people-to-people), Friemily(Friend and Family), UnI(You and I)...They aren't the best nomenclature. But at least they are better than 'Consumers'!

2007 resolution. As far as possible, avoid the use of this word/ mind-set:-)

Picture courtesy: Gettyimages

Creating Change Not Just Measuring It

I had a very stimulating discussion/ cathartic thought flow/ exchange with Uber at ThotBlurb( specifically at thotblurbed # 28) on who is a creative planner and the silo-ization in advertising!

And a week ago I was in a conference on change management and thinking differently!

While in this thot blurb/ zone, felt like re-visiting one of the greatest ads on the subject ever made. By the NY office of TBWA\Chiat\Day...Think Different.

The wikipedia version of the copy.Think Different

Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.The rebels. The troublemakers.

The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules
And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing that you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.

They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.

They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?

Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can
change the world, are the ones who do.

My News

Okay, I promise this won't be a rant about 'the degenerate state of News TV' in India. Have already done that here and here.

Just a plot of my news watching habit over the years...And yes a small peek in the near future:-)

A Lesson in Simplicity

Recently I heard Robyn Putter, the current creative head of WPP, a veteran in South African Advertising circles and ex-Ogilvy adman speak at a conference! It was a lesson in simplicity. At first so simple that I felt cheated. LOL

If I had to distillate his speech in one sentence this would be it. The lesson for me as a planner and consumer researcher. I think it puts things in perspective. And hopefully will keep me prepared for the inevitable surprises...

Experience Submaps

I had been wanting to read Gerald Zaltman's 'How Customers Think' for a long time now. Recently got a copy...In the first flip through, came across this 'Experience Submap'. Common-sensical but quite often over-looked when we look at a brand for research and sensorial understanding....

Here it is...from Zaltman, the Nestle Crunch Bar Submap...

Aap Bhi Taj!!

In the celebrity starved/ craving world of Indian brands, there was one refreshing endorsement that had stood the test of time. That of the tabla maestro - Ustaad Zakir Hussain's endorsement of Taj Mahal chai!

Am a tea drinker who never really liked the product. But was a great fan of Zakir saheb! The endorsement was so apt. Chai has a certain Indian-ness, a certain nazaakat which the Ustaad epitomised with his flavourful presence, his tabla recital and the 'Arrey Huzoor Wah Taj Boleye' tagline.

Of course, age had caught up with the Ustaad. He looked jaded. And so the brand has decided to replace him with the 'now-in-heavy-demand' Saif. Decent choice.

However, I - the non-user of the brand will miss Zakir Saheb, who was among the most recognisable and long-term celeb faces of any Indian brand!

Thinking aloud - Was there a brand story in passing the baton from Zakir Saheb to Saif Ali that the agency didn't fully capitalise.

Does the brand owe an explanation to its loyal fans on the choice of a new endorser?

In an age of intimate conversations with the brand, consensus, interactivity and user generated content was it the right thing to suddenly replace the iconic brand face with the current-heavy-in demand celeb face?

Or is the thought just plain nostalgia drivel!!

Simplexity and the Change Agent

I was in Cambodia for a planning conference over the last week. That should partly explain my absence from the blogosphere. The hotel(I suspect the city) was somewhat Internet unfriendly:-)
And once again I enjoyed my break from our media dominated/ saturated world. That makes it twice in the last two months.

The conference was held in the beautiful temple city of Siam Reap. In a country that has been ravaged by civil strife, it was great to see it bounce back with spirit and simplicity. The combination of a tourist friendly nation and the heritage of Angkor Vat temples was breathtaking...

I could have come back with just a touristy notion which often is superficial and 'feel great'. But for the cello recital of Dr. Beat Richner - a Swiss doctor who in the past 15 years has opened three children's hospitals in Cambodia, all run from private donations! The doctor holds a cello concert in Siam Reap every Saturday night to raise money for the hospital.

During and after the cello recital Dr. Richner made an impassioned plea for money
and blood for the Cambodian children. Opened our eyes to the WHO and most of the West's obsession with glamour-diseases like SARS and AIDS and the blind eye turned to non-glam diseases like diarrhoea, tuberculosis and simply anaemia.

Complex and horrific health facts came to the surface which had been camouflaged by the carefully crafted sanitisation of the senses. 70% of Cambodia doesn't have access to safe drinking water. Appalling rates of HIV infection among the kids and very little access to health facilities and corruption!

Our conference was around the idea of 'change'. But of course advertising has it's limitations in a commerce and capitalism dominated world. So the issues were about changing out mind-sets, our way of thinking so that our clients could sell in the end more soap, more cola, more chips to the 'haves' of the world!!(Okay, I am being unfair to my occupation. It has its limitations at the end of the day!)

However, as I drove back to the airport, the image of an angry Dr. Beat stuck in my head and consciousness. He is the real change agent and a citizen brand. And am glad that my company has commited money and time for his cause.

One of the drifts that I had spoken about earlier this year was about Simplexity. The ability to hide the underlying complexity of a product, an experience, a nation behind the veneer/ facade / shell of simplicity...And I felt that Simplexity in my gut at Siam Reap!