Ram Aur Shyam and the Power of Stories!!

Some time back I had promised myself that will pen this post about Ram aur Shyam!

Well, Ram aur Shyam were these two characters(detectives) created by the iconic India brand - Parle (Poppins) many decades back...They are not around anymore...The current Poppins tagline reads - Goli Rainbow Wali...Okay so why am I telling all this...

One fine day, as a harried father hassled for a different bed-time story every night, I decided to dig into memory and fished out 'Ram aur Shyam' from the attic of my memory!

- These Ram aur Shyam stories came as a serialised print ad on the back page of a children's magazine called 'Parag'(from the TOI group if I remember correctly, but went off the market more than a decade back)

- I loved Poppins(the differently coloured, button shaped candies - 10 to a pack) and loved these two characters who solved a crime using Poppins! Sometimes the Poppins trail led to the 'bad guy'. Other times the Poppins pack doubled up as a gun to hold up the baddie...

- Three decades later, on a whim and no particular reason, I decided to resurrect the two characters to satisfy the daily story needs of Neo...

- Little did I know that Ram aur Shyam would be an instant hit at par with Ben 10 and my rating as father which till then was trailing behind my wife by a mile would receive a shot in the arm LOL

- These stories are fairly interactive:-) Neo chooses the venue of the story every night(that's a whole new ritual)...Ram aur Shyam take a flight to that venue. So he chooses the airline as well...

- The success of these stories with my 5 year old son remind me of a sad truth : many Indian brands have often abandoned their well entrenched brand stories and carelessly moved ahead. Like Poppins did or like Ceat abandoned the Rhino story or like Air India fails to build upon the Maharaja mascot/ story...Onida had to ferret out the devil story from it's past to regain(well partially) it's voice again...

- The problem, I feel is never in the stories. It's almost always in the lack of belief in brand teams and the absence of imagination to recast them for the new times...

- Like I mentioned in the Ceat post, powerful brand narratives shouldn't be junked in a huff...There are ways and means to contemporise the plot and the characters.

- In fact the more the media gets cluttered, and the decibel level of brand hype gets raised, simple brand stories from the past might help communicate better.Stories will allow better conversation with the brand in the new social media eco-system that's getting constructed all around!

- I just hope with animation getting so evolved and games getting central to marketing to kids, maybe characters like Ram aur Shyam(and their contemporary avatars) will again find their way into the brand narrative...

Either ways, I marvel how a candy brand(mere zamane ka) came to my rescue in telling the daily bedtime stories:-)

P.S. Just couldn't find a copy of the old Ram Aur Shyam Poppins print ad...Hai kya kissi ke pass?

CEAT : Born Tough. Died Unceremoniously

It's the season of random logo changes(or so I feel). First Shoppers Stop, then Godrej, then agencyfaqs and of course CEAT. And all of them have been big disappointments!!

CEAT has been the most beguiling, bewildering of all the logo changes. Ray & Keshawan have produced another characterless dud. My favourite Rhino has been killed!!

Of course the company cites some insipid research where consumers have said the logo is old and the rhino slothful. Alas the consumers were projecting their impressions of the company on the logo!

Anyways, once again Change is for the worse, Change is bloody expensive(apparently CEAT is burning 10 crores on the Ogilvy made ad campaign and Change is confusing as hell...

The Rhino and Born Tough were iconic emblems of brand CEAT. They could have been easily contemporised...

These days many clients brief design agencies independently on corporate brand changes without keeping the ad agency in the loop. The end result is often a disconnected change bereft of the brand history and context!!

You can read Harish B's related post on the subject here...

Jara Sochiye Aur Channel Badalye

Zee News changed its logo and the baseline few minutes back. The brand is close to my heart coz I co-created the last baseline - 'Haqeeqat Jaisi Khabar Waisi' along with the Leo Burnett creative Kosty in 2003 or so...

Few months back I had also pitched for the business from Bates, although I don't think it was my contribution that won the business:-)

The re-launched logo has a black back-ground instead of red. Big deal!!The launch TVC looks tired and has a sense of deja vu. Too many brands have done similar executions...

The hyperbole is still there. The programme - Badi Khabar at 10pm was sensational but disturbing for family viewing!!

Going back to my lo-fat diet of Indian media!! Soch liya...

Think Something New

Shoppers Stop has changed it's logo under a campaign called 'Start Something New'. It has a heard-it-somewhere-before ringtone. I think thoughts like - Start Something New work better in action than in image. So will reserve judgement till the next store visit.

I find the new Ray & Keshavan logo quite bland and sans character...In fact I like the older logo. Maybe they should have asked all their customers before changing the logo. And the gold/ platinum card customers could have had veto rights...LOL

You can read the story at afaqs here...

Great Indian Brand : Chandamama

Was returning from a client meet few days back when I noticed Chandamama on the pavement! Brought back childhood yaadein - Slouched on the bed and reading vikram aur betaal:-)

Picked it up for Neo. He was happy for precisely 5 seconds and then tossed it aside. Must read a story to him one of these days!!

Chandamama is turning 60 and digital. Check out this iconic Indian brand's web-site here...

You may wish to read a related story on HT here...

At retirement age, the once-fading title is poised to reinvent itself with an upgraded Web presence featuring interactive games and puzzles, downloadable wallpapers for cellphones and programmes on Worldspace radio!!

As a book, Chandamama has seen a revival too, going up to four lakh readers from 1.3 lakh in six months. To toast it, a 96-page comic book will hit the stands every four months from April 21.

The Joy and Despair of Flying

Disclaimer: I like/okay love XYZ Airways. Last year I made 83 trips...I am their platinum card member...And the free air miles financed my Kerala trip in December:-)

So this rant against their public address system(and many other airlines) is just one peeve among the many joys!!

Hey guys, do something about it...The more I hear, the more I hate!!

Sample this(of course hugely contrived and exaggerated for effect:-)

1.This is your captain speaking from the cock-pit.
Oh great I thought you were making out in the loo...

2. Whether you are in business class or economy, I have pleasure in announcing that all of you are flying to Mumbai. Window, middle, aisle seats. All of you guys...
Thank you so much captain! I was waiting for that re-assurance from you!!!

3. It's a pleasure having you on-board.(Actually in a 2 hour flight this message often comes after 90minutes of flight...LOL

4. The temperature outside is -38.673 deg Celsius. This is 2.456 degrees less than normal. Mind it!!

3. But we have somehow managed to maintain the temperature inside the cabin at an annoyingly high 26 degrees...Since we love playing with the temperature knob. And pushing down our otherwise high consumer satisfaction scores!

4. We are now flying over the lovely city of Jaipur. If you manage to strain your neck 254 degrees from the aisle seat, you will still not be able to see anything...It's just a practical joke we play on the aisle seat passengers!!

5. The aircraft is flying at 854km/hr. But we will still be late by 55 minutes. Please ponder over this meaningless statistic. We get joy at throwing random numbers at people.

6. As per the current report from the control-room, we are number 12 in the Mumbai air-traffic-queue. But you know the fickle minded, twice-divorced air-traffic controller...By the time we approach Mumbai, he may put us at number 21!! So, don't take any of these announcements at face value...

7. I hope you followed my delayed, mostly irrelevant information read from a script outsourced by the legendary Rapidex guys and delivered in our trade-mark English which only frequent flyers can understand or so we think...

(We at XYZ airways have collectively failed the 'Lagey Raho' speech improvement programme...But Hum Honge Kaamyaab Ek Din...)

Finally the last of these messages put you to deep sleep despite the insidious 'temperature knob playing tactic!!!

I don't know who looks after the public address systems of most airlines...But they are uniformly crappy and banal...

For all brands, specially the service brands, the last mile customer-exchange/ conversation/monologue is quite important...

No, I wouldn't ever change my airlines because of this. I have far too many reward points to take care off:-)
But there are no diminishing returns for a service brand for being interesting, witty, human and sensible even at 45000ft up in the sky when the temperature outside is -38.679 deg Celsius...LOL

Who Needs Advertising When You Have a Nano!

By now you must have heard & seen it all. The Buzz. The Bytes and the hottening Bazaar for the Nano.

The giga byte Nano surround sound!!

I can't remember when was the last time I really got excited about a car launch(actually any product)!!

A friend called me excitedly as CNBC broke the launch story from the Auto Expo...

In the evening I caught up with a high-decibel and a not-so-high quality debate on NDTV with Suhel Seth, R K Pachauri(noble winner), Sunita Narain(Centre for Science & Environment) and Medha Patkar...

Had a debate about the Nano with my wife in the morning over chai! Thought about it(about the road congestion, about buying it, about gifting it:-) about getting it's ad account) all through yesterday!!

Sample the headlines in the various dailies today...

HT - H/L : Small wonder
Body Copy : It is green, it is global, it is Indian. It costs a lakh and it
is called the Nano.

TOI - H/L : Tata Reinvents the Wheel
Body Copy : Others said No. Tata said Nano

HT Mint - H/l : Tata Small Car Throws a Big Punch
Body copy : Ratan Tata's personal quest ends in a winner!

ET - H/L : Nano Second to None
Body Copy : Dream car's brush with history

Indian Express - H/L : 1 lakh car drives 1 billion dreams
Body Copy : Little Nano, the big thing!

As I open my gmail in the morning, my friend and benevolent spamster - Ramakant has already sent me a Nano pix and sound bytes & another friend has sent some stories about the making of the Nano!

However, in sharp contract to the Giga Buzz, the paid ad by Rediff(Full Page in TOI) was quite mediocre(though the car looks beautiful in the layout), low on energy and perhaps quite unnecessary!

The Rediff Nano ad reads...
H/L : It's here. The new Tata Nano
To end all speculation, debate and talk!

Okay, thanks for telling me that!! But Mr. Advertising Agency, you are 24 hours late, got nothing new to tell and need a better copy-writer. Try HT, Indian Express...

Of course, I maybe too immersed in the Nano; but so is the nation...And as communications people, who need to have a pulse on the nation's psyche...this ad should have been done differently(if at all)

Quick thoughts on how I wud have done it...Actually, no why give ideas for free:-)

But the point is it would have paid(like hell) to take into account the context of a national frenzy around a dream car. Plug into the conversation of the people. And I don't mean higher SEC people who e-mail, search, blog, twitter, orkut, facebook it only!

Plug into even the choupal conversations, the adda, udipi, nukkad conversations...(Maybe it's all coming around the corner. Maybe this rant is a bit early...)

But for God's sake, add something to that conversation. However, Nano it might be or get out of the way and save some precious media budgets!

Let TOI, Aaj Tak, Dainik Jagran, Punjab Kesari and Saamna do the job well.

Nano is a small car but a big paradigm shift! Can advertising build a philosophy around the car?

It's not so much about positioning. In the long run, it's more about the new priorities and the complex questions (environmental, ethical, etc.)that the Nano will throw up!

Can Nano be the desire to celebrate 'Less is More'. Of reducing the carbon and other foot-print, of using less resources....Then communication has a role!

Otherwise, to sell a cute 1 lakh car, who needs advertising!!

The Future of Entertainment

Just read my blog friend Neil Perkins's detailed post on the 'Future of Entertainment. Since many of the trends 2008 pieces in the Indian media-sphere have been quite vapid and vacuous, catching up on this post was quite a relief...

Neil, allow me to quote from your post and salt & pepper it with my India-centric thots.

1. Entertainment is becoming more fluid and flexible, interactive and active, individually defined, networked, varied in time, location and place...

2. Growing affluence underpins higher expectations. Even children have increasingly sophisticated demands. They are not confined by traditional constructs of consumption!

Just this morning, my 4 yr old son, Neo asked his Nani for a 'real mobile'. He was specific & assertive - 'Khilona nahin chahiye. Baat karna hai'!! Our own expectations from customer service, vacations, lifestyle, fashion & technology brands have grown exponentially and continue to do so...

We are all on a hedonistic consumer treadmill. We need better experiences to give us the same or less kick!

3. There is a powerful role for the shared collective experience (seen currently in the growth in live music, and strong demand for sports viewing).

This is one area where we cud spend some time in 2008. Brand conversations, activities and planned actions largely happen with a one-to-one marketer mind-set.

4. Networks of communication are already ubiquitous but our understanding of their full potential and operation is still pubescent. But huge potential exists beyond the blogging phenomenon and current popular networking sites for evolving forms of creativity and expression.

Ad agencies will take a while understanding the potential of community communication here in India. My guess is that media agencies, digital out-fits and new web based entrepreneurial companies, small and mid size will show the path. Then maybe the large networks will wake up and shake up!

5. A growing proportion of the population is and will be consistently multitasking. According to this research, people are currently fitting in more than 7.2 hours of additional activities into the average day!!

- How do I calculate how many more hours did I pack in my day in 2007??
- So do we do MGFs(Multi Tasking Group Discussions) now to elicit new behavioural patterns?
- And how do we measure attentive eye-balls!:-)
- How does it impact the 30 sec commercial, or the viral video.
- Do we need a new guy, say called the Media Landscapist to do the thinking around this subject...

6. The ‘new meaning of luxury’ is about time oases and getting away from it all. And reinforces the long term demand for the ‘bring it on’ realm of media-delivered entertainment on TV and magazines, as well as creating interesting links to the ‘cult of the home’ with home as primary site for downtime, in our busy, choice-overloaded daily lives...

- Hey, this trend I had predicted in 2002-03( pre blogging days). Had written a piece called the 'Division Economy' back then. Maybe it was ahead of its time. LOL
- Will this new time oasis be age dependent?
- Is it a big enough business to leave my planner job and jump into? LOL

Thanks Neil for getting me thinking as always and Happy New Year buddy!

Vinod Mehta Ko Gussa Kyun Aata Hai

Just read a good speech by Vinod Mehta(editor-in-chief, Outlook group of publications) on afaqs. Since it's getting harder and harder these days to read/ view good content in the Indian media-sphere, any good content must be re-purposed and circulated:-) May the tribes of men/ women like Mehta increase...

You can read the full article on agencyfaqs here...

Snack bytes
1. He touched upon the media’s myopia regarding how its credibility is being eroded. To the extent that journalism today is often confused with being part of the entertainment industry.

2. Once you treat the media as if it is no different from running an ice-cream parlour, journalism loses out to commerce.

3. As journalists we need to remember that a newspaper’s credibility is like the virginity of a woman. You can lose it only once.

4. "I say this with much humility, but brand managers, with honourable exceptions, are congenitally incapable of understanding the nature and purpose of journalism. They simply cannot understand it by virtue of their background: which is sales in order to maximise profits. They can never understand that content is more, much more, than what readers want. It also has a social dimension. Thus, content is a mix of what the reader wants and what he does not want. The trick is to marry the two and make money."

5. Ladies and gentlemen, in my nearly 30 years as editor, I have heard a lot of nonsense talked about journalism and its role in India, but this piece of nonsense - 'The reader is King and give him what he demands' - is outrageously and self-evidently absurd and dangerous.

To demolish it is urgent. To let it become the benchmark of our profession is to put in peril everything we have worked for in 60 years.

6. We must lead readers, not be led by them. Really great journalism must do more than merely give people what they want. There has to be room for the unexpected, for stories the public has no idea it wants until it sees them.

What Mr. Mehta rants about is not a phenomena restricted to print or TV media. This senseless and gut-less pandering to 'this is what the consumer wants' ails advertising as well. Read a related post here...

The Diminishing Return On Taglines

After more than two weeks of 'Zero TV'(just a few DVDs), switched on the tube. With little Neo around, watched Tom & Jerry, Mr. Bean and Ben10(hope I remember the name right!!).

Then switched between the half a dozen(lesser) barely sane News Channels and loads of ads...Some ad tagline triggered this train of thot...

1. The one-word-creative-brief and the creative leap has resulted in a whole factory of brand taglines of the 'xyz de' format...

Hilaa de, Pilaa de, Ghumaa de, Jalaa de, Dhikhaa de, Bataa de, Jeeta de

2. At first these 'xyz de' ads were genuinely funny, then there were occasional bright sparks, then they became a Big Bazaar commodity product and now they are mostly pakao spam ads on TV. At least they appear to me:-) Disagreements invited.

3. The thing about these 'xyz de' taglines is that one mostly attributes the tagline to the wrong brand, or even the wrong category and mostly never remembers the message(if there is one)...

4. Fleeting thot - This 'xyz de' tagline hype is in such sharp contrast to the general conversational tone of the web, blogs and the tweets...

5. I feel the 'xyz ads' have mostly diminishing returns today. With the odd exception of say a Mentos where 'Aam Zindagi vs Mentos Zindagi' is a clearly differentiated brand turf, the rest are largely creative indulgences at the expense of the client's money!!

6. So what's the solution? I think it's time we looked at ads sans taglines. There are simply too many of them. We don't need them. Because I suspect people don't register and definitely can't keep track of them anyways. Tagline Overload - especially if you are the 25th candy brand in a cluttered market.

7. So what's the solution? Focus on creating enduring/ endearing symbols/ icons(Mc Donalds), memetic concepts(Wah Sunil Babu, Badhia Hai variety), sticky concepts that can be built into a brand world-view(yes even for a candy brand), a micro-site to engage, develop the thot. Maybe a combo solution. But definitely not a 'xyz de' tagline...

8. There ain't no easy solution. Especially with a generation of creatives in India raised on the belief that 1-word briefs and 3 word taglines will Sab problem solve kara de!!:-)

There is no "Chutki Mein Suljha de" solution here...LOL

Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai

Bollywood's biggest marketing stunt triumphs...Saw OSO. The die-hard SRK fan that I am, enjoyed every moment of the first half and struggled doing the same for the second!!

Stray thoughts before they evaporate like the movie:-)

1. SRK is a bigger marketer than all the HUL marketing men pooled together...OSO is not a film. It's MDH masala right through...

2. OSO is the finest Bollywood Ketchup - Film narrative meets chat-show meets spoof meets filmfare award shows meets muhurat parties...

3. You can fool all the people all the time with fast pace editing and 'zero-audience-reaction' time LOL

4. Deepika Padukone is desirably attractive - found her a mash-up of Priyanka Chopra and Juhi Chawla. Kept the ketchup fresh and spicy...

5. Bollywood's new equation is 30% Amitabh, 50% King Khan, Rest 20%

6. I wish advertising would play with the 30 sec formats like Farah has played with the 3 hour one...

I don't think I would remember OSO tomorrow morning but it was one hell of a numbed-mind-colour-riot...

Kitsch kitsch hua mujhe bhi...

Jab Gopinath Met Mallya

Am referring to yet another merger and brand name change. Good ole Air Deccan dons the new name of Simplifly Deccan. And here I had barely stomached the inane name change from Indian Airlines to Indian Airlines!

I love both the characters in the sky play - Vijay Mallya,love him for being the Indian Richard Branson(in flamboyance, attitude,business acumen, ambition and aspiration if a little less in business creativity). And Capt. Gopinath for making flying accessible to the common Indian( well the ET/TOI definition of the common Indian:-)

And likewise, their two airline brands are so very different. Air Deccan - simple, accessible, human(thanks to those lovely Orchard advertising), a lil earthy & maybe frugal and KF - reeking with flamboyance, class, excess, exclusivity, Yana Gupta and the dressed-in-red-air-hostesses..

Maybe Air Deccan had to change as Mallya no longer wants it to be a cheap-airline. Budget/ economy yes, cheap no! But why tamper with such a strong brand! Why merge its distinct identity into KF.

I feel the Deccan-KF design promiscuity might dilute the KF aura a bit...It's still early days, but I am not vey sure if this new Deccan nomenclature and 360 design synergy with KF was the best possible branding solution...

GreatWayToHaveAWebsite.com

Some days back, Rob (Mosley) from a small London creative agency Nonsense wrote a mail to me...

He and his team are putting together their web-site...High Time We Had A Website
In a bigger agency set-up, few suits would have gotten together and created a brief and then it would have been delegated to the IT department/ their vendor and periodic status reports...

I think hightimewehadawebsiteis an example of online presence meets agency POV/ creativity meets WOM meets wisdom of the crowd!

Mental note : Must do something on these lines in the next 6 months...In fact the learning would be really useful for a co-creation project that I am doing(for some reason I don't like the sound of this word Co-creation though, sounds too mechanistic)

And guys...Do visit this site and vote...There are just 14 days before voting closes!!

Context is Everything

Spotted this little ad on the now ubiquitous Garbage Dumper on the streets of Bombay...

Translated it means - "Please don't litter or spread old jokes!!"
It's an ad for the show Great Indian Laughter Challenge III on Star One...

Another kick-ass 'contextual ad' was the towel I got as a freebie at the Goa Ad Fest earlier this year from Times Now. The message said - "Big or small, we cover them all":-)

One of the biggest ways to fight ad clutter in the media landscape would be to tell interesting stories in a context. The relentless pumping of advertising rupees without a context mostly irritates the consumer or is plain filtered...

Little Drops of Joy. A Torrent of Money Wasted

The most lousy ads that I have come across this last month must be this Coca Cola corporate spiel!

In an environment of general upper middle class cola-apathy, this just is so out of place...

I guess there are other ways to highlight the good corporate citizen-ship work that the cola majors are doing. Good work. A bit underplayed by a cola-bashing media. Helping the government in some water-table/ irrigation related issues and else...

So why this terrible campaign? Why should anybody in their right mind believe this piece of manufacture statement - Little Drops of Joy!!!

In any case it looks like a rehash of the old Kinley tagline - Boond boond mein vishwas, which at that time made sense, was in a context and was a reasonably nice campaign...

I mean a good percentage of the country is/ was under floods. 70% of the Indian population lives off Rs.20 per day and here's this global brand telling us that its largely sugar-and-perhaps-not-so-pure-water, aerated drink gives us Indians joy in our daily lives..

I have not been able to figure out which is worse, the strategy or the creative campaign...

Visual Post Its : Ganpati Marketing

Every year, Ganpati is getting more and more immersed in marketing...Few samples from this year!!

And if you have better/ bizarre/ innovative examples do share...

Twenty20 : Observations of a Couch Potato

What a match!! What a befitting final for the twenty20 game...Wonder what the TRPs have shot to!

This is the raciest format of cricket on the planet, and as a couch potato, there is never a moment to slouch save for the ads, the best of which appear so repetitive and boring!

As I watched the matches up to the final, few thoughts passed my mind. In no particular order...

1. Multiple Creatives. I wish marketers and us agency types quickly root for multiple creatives. If our messages are repetitive, in the racy Twenty20 format, they would be all screened out by the viewer!! Even the SRK starrer Pepsi ad became a headache after a while(and that when I am a die-hard SRK fan)

2. Entertainment Quotient.. I guess we now need to rate all our ads on EQ and not just messaging objectives! Only the ones that have an EQ comparable to the twenty20 game ought to be aired:-) The rest will be noisy irritants, filtered by the couch potato! I ignored all of them!

Guys, at best we are creating branded interruptions. The public might just appreciate if we make them really entertaining.

3. Category fit.I feel certain categories are a total mis-fit with this racy, non-stop, edge-of-the-seat format of the game. I remember I saw an ad for Amity B-School. The message and the creative execution was clearly out of place with the twenty20 environment!

If your product category doesn't fit in this breezy format, one would better stay away and save some money!

4. Media Innovation. If you ask me the best media innovation would be to air shorter TVCs. If the overs have reduced from 50 to 20, shouldn't the TVC duration be reduced to 5 seconders or some such thing:-)

Twenty20 is transforming the game of cricket as the overs reduce from 50 to 20. It is less cricket and more like a 'Bollywood entertainer'. I think our humble ads need to change to fit in this new game...

Bang On, Big Bang But Very Expected!

Of course I didn't watch the Hutch(oops Vodaphone) TVCs on now the much hyped Star TV block. There are more interesting things like the Twenty20 on the tube!

Hyped as a major media innovation( although I fail to see why it's an innovation.)It's a big budget ROAD BLOCK rather than a Great Idea.

Well, finally Hutch - the country’s fourth-largest mobile service provider has changed it's identity yet again. And I think it has done it the right way. Almost too right I feel:-)

1. Retained the cute, lovable pug as well as the two animated characters (the girl and the boy)

2. Promises to retain the tagline - "Wherever you go, the network follows" especially for the network related ads.

3. “Hutch was a well-loved brand, and all the things which the customer found endearing will continue to be projected,” said Harit Nagpal, the company's marketing and new business director, on agencyfaqs.com. Well, that again is the most sensible thing to do. Indian marketers I feel are too trigger happy with change. Very often change for change sake!

4. The company insists, Vodaphone will be a more mass brand, offering value-added services, in all the existing 16 circles rather than maintaining an up-market brand imagery from it's international lineage...

5. It's among the most humongous brand name changes in Indian marketing, affecting the lives of almost 35 million customers across 400,000 shops! And looks like the client and the agency have done a great logistical job!

From the little that I have seen of the name-change, it's bang-on and correct but somewhere my expectations from Hutch( sorry Vodaphone:-) and the agency Ogilvy in particular were a bit higher...But it's still early days!

Ogilvy has a habit of surprising everyone with great advertising particularly towards the year end:-)

Last Mile Stories 2

Kapil had shared this loo photograph of the Novotel Hotel in Bangkok...Smart LMI(Last Mile Idea:-)

On the subject of last-mile interaction, I feel the humble post-it can be put to great use. Many companies(especially the small retail stores) can gain immensely by using post-its at the Last Mile for instant feedback. Instead of giving those boring, lousy feedback forms...What say?

Of course. Agreed, you can't process the feedback quantitatively. But do we always need to process data quantitatively. Often I feel a combination of experience, gut feel and random but in-depth feedback from a few passionate shoppers serves the purpose just as well!

Small Big Idea

The soon to be launched in Mumbai - the all woman Taxi service!!This woman's brain child!!