Ganpati, Street Installations and Ghostbikes

My colleagues Varun and Bheda have created this masterpiece - a Ganpati made up of cycle parts. They had shared the thought while it was still a thumb-nail. At that time, I never fathomed it would come out this awesome!! It was displayed at the Kala Ghoda festival. You can read more about it here...

While all the praise and adulation coming their way is well deserved, perhaps the greatest words of wisdom came from a simple street-side urchin. “Bangaar se bhagwaan banaya!” (They made God from junk!) he exclaimed. Here’s wishing the duo much luck in their ‘divine’ bicycle mission!(Mumbai Mirror)

Wikipedia defines Street Installations as a growing trend within the "street art" movement. Whereas conventional street art/graffiti is done on surfaces/walls "street installations" use 3-D objects/space to interfere with the urban environment. Like graffiti, it is non-permission based and once the object/sculpture is installed it is left there by the artist.

While on my hunt for street installations I stumbled upon ghostbikes.org. Ghost Bikes are small and somber memorials for bicyclists who are killed or hit on the street. A bicycle is painted all white and locked to a street sign near the crash site, accompanied by a small plaque. They serve as reminders of the tragedy that took place on an otherwise anonymous street corner, and as quiet statements in support of cyclists' right to safe travel.

The first ghost bikes were created in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003, and they have since appeared in nearly 75 cities throughout the world.I feel street installations have the innate ability to create Talk Value for brands. They straddle between the commercial and art worlds quite ambidextrously...The hand crafted installation gives the brand a more authentic voice. One just hopes it doesn't get over-abused by clients and brands in the future.

Teach India : Wish I Had Thot Of It

There often comes an idea you wish you had done it/ thought about it. The Teach India campaign from TOI is one suck kick-ass idea!

Brutally simple, yet immensely powerful and so sorely needed for India.

"Teach India" is an initiative by 'The Times of India' to help provide an equal opportunity for education to underprivileged children.

The aim of "Teach India" is to provide a platform to educated Indians to provide assistance in basic education to the unprivileged children.

"Teach India" will connect educated individuals with the specialist education providers.

'The Times of India' has tied up with select NGOs in the field of education in multiple cities across India.

Participants have to devote just 2 hours a day to teach underprivileged children, either in a formal environment or even informal teaching like story telling.

There were mote than 10K responses on day one. Some companies are volunteering batches of 50 employees for this...I just signed up!

No Entry To Brands

I hate the term social media. I feel it lowers the value of both 'media' and the concept of being social. The term is just a convenient envelope to help brands/ commercial media trespass into the private space of people more indiscreetly than ever before!!

Some time back had stumbled upon this post by Richard Huntington which splendidly captures my sentiment. Do read the post.

By trespassing on spheres of conversations between real people, brands reveal their fake selves even more quickly than before.

Social media must not end up being a 'Selling Ground' for brands...The sooner marketers realise this, the better. Because the people out here are smarter, with more IQ, more EQ, more creativity, more environmental sensitiveness than what mass market brands would have ever come across!!

The cost of a backlash to an intrusive brand sales pitch could be quite high in the long term!!

Nostalgia Brand

Neo went to a birthday party...And got these Camlin Flora pencils in his 'khoi bag'- the goody bag which kids get(I hope I got the name right...)

Hey Meraj, these Camlin Flora pencils haven't changed since I was a kid and that guys was almost BC LOL

I tried stealing some of the pencils...Neo kept thwarting my efforts...

Just a thought - it's such an un-explored area in India - the creation of Nostalgia brands...Is there a big enough market for them?

Cars, music systems(Imagine launching a really retro-cool Murphy radio with the calendar FREE!!) or Binaca toothpaste with the plastic small toys only for 30+ guys...LOL

Guess age is catching up with me...sigh

The World of Adike and More 2

This of course is a manufactured image...Little Neo was fascinated with this making of Adike2 LOL...

8. Every few years/ now months new types of brands enter our worlds which weren't there till some time back. Hi-Technology brands, Knowledge/information brands, Concept brands, Cause brands, the sub-set Green brands, Social media brands, DIY brands, Experience brands, the proliferation of Luxury brands...

And almost all of them play by rules that are fundamentally different from FMCG brand rules of the past.

9. Real, authentic(often contrived-authenticity) conversations are replacing the copy of our advertised messages...It really doesn't matter who starts this conversation. It could be the CEO, the guy-on-the-net, the copy-writer, the planner, the passionate marketer...It's about a collaborative project.

10. It's very difficult for the brand to hide anymore. So little scope for bull-shiting, no hype, consistency in all markets, brands gotta 'walk the talk' or refrain from taking the high ground.

11. Brands got to be all human...have a character and not a laundry list of all 'virtuosity'. Have flaws. Admit to them...Have a sense of humour and play.

12. And lastly, I feel we must somehow devise methods to measure the quality of consumer-brand relationships, not just contact points, eye-balls, awareness scores, foot-falls...
We never measure our personal relationships through eye-balls, foot-falls, awareness scores...Why should brand thinking be any different?
That's all I can collate for the moment...Maybe some-time later will do Adike 3!!

The World of Adike and More 1

Few days ago, I noticed my Nike and Adidas deos jostling for shelf space in the bathroom. It felt strange. There was a time, about a decade back when I was a great Nike loyalist. Fed up on advertising case studies, hand-me down brand myths and real + planted PR stories, I adored the brand!

A few years later, when I was working at TBWA Mumbai, I switched allegiance(though never gave up the Nike brand-citizenship:-)to Adidas. The imagery and some of the more hand-crafted stories of Adidas grabbed the mindspace!

Then came a stage when I wore Nike sneakers. But I loved the Adidas TVCs more. But now when it comes to accesories and apparel. Things like SALE, the shop ambience, the call-of-the-mall urges and last mile communication swings the deal...

The above image of the two erstwhile adversary brands led me to the following thoughts...I felt how I approach brands has dramatically changed in the last 10 years !!

1. Today last mile dictates most of my brand purchases - from toothpaste brands to apparel, durables and consumables!

2. Very often image-led advertisng is for entertainment and aesthetic consumption alone. The purchase is on rational parameters, convenience and value-based offers which have nothing to do with the image.

3. I am not loyal to 'only image' anymore. To a brand, or to its philosophy. In most cases it's a consideration basket of brands that I date. Multiple brands for the multi-tasking mind and the multi-avatars that we don...Brand relationships aren't monogamous any-more!

4. But occasionally I give into 'Flash Brands'. Theses fast rising-from-nowhere people and product brands, backed by manipulative marketing and a combo of PR + Buzz + the shared UGC technology available. Harry Potter, Shilpa Shetty, iPhone can all be bracketed under this cluster...

5. Personally, I value brands that have authentic stories...Decades of image manipulation(and here the fatigue is more because of greater proximity to the branding/ advertising process) have left me cynical about most brand messages.
Tag-lines don't work with me. Neither does hype or manufactured statements.

6. The other thing which has fundamentally changed is that I expect my brands to be inconsistent and surprise me. This is a marked departure from the 'consistency is King' school of thought...
Brands now need to be more creative than consistent in their final expressions...

7. I feel much of the puerile research that happens around us dates the consumer intelligence and evolution by a zillion years. In a digital age, we are trying to measure atomic clock movements of consumers realtionship with brands with vernier callipers LOL

Many a time we ask the wrong questions, in the wrong context, in the wrong way. Then we interpret them wrongly, draw wrong conclusions and recommend wrong things. Then reapeat this chain!!

There are some other thoughts around Adike which I will capture in the sequel to this post...

P.S. I wish to label all the new dichotomous thoughts around brands under 'Adike'

Sunday, Strategy and Serendipity

I always wonder how one phone call or a sudden change in plans can change the shape of the day, a year or even life...

Sitting in cafe Moshe at Fab India near fountain, watching the pubescent monsoon drizzle, I just called a friend of mine(who is into film production). It was otherwise a routine, quiet, complete home-chores-on Sunday kind of day!

By chance, my friend was in Colaba. So, we had coffee and a long conversation together.

Caught up on Bollywood gossip. Discussed 3 business ideas(one of my favourite subjects for the last 2-3 years), got some leads on good designers!!

I have realized lately that almost all of my better ideas come from serendipity...Be it a chance conversation, a google talk thread, a news item buried in a magazine section browsed at the airport...

And that I have realized is perhaps the best way to capture good ideas...Over time I have been trying to perfect the art of archiving/ storing/ referencing these random ideas.

Strategy in an uncertain world is a lot about serendipity. Even when handling big and small brands, I feel we spend far too much of out time over consistency. Whereas it would really help the brand if we focussed on surprise and serendipity...

New Age Brands Have a Different Ning!

A little late in the day(48 hours back to be precise), I discovered the online social networking brand Ning introduced to me by my new digital partner and co-conspirator(John Lambie)!

Okay, back to Ning. After 48 hours I try to discover more about it. Google for the site but find that it's down for repairs. However, I still end up liking it. Because it's got a sense of humour and a message that's warm and human. It's also got a cute little bear trying to repair the site...

Ning like a person apologises for the technical snafu and directs me to the Ning blog and enthusiastically gives me an approx. timing when it would be up and running...

In fact this is what the message reads - At midnight tonight, we're going to take Ning offline to add a few new features. We'll be back in action by the time the bars in California close and you'll be free to resume your late night social networking.

Guys my 10 year old credit card company, 7 years old mobile service provider company, my 8 year old bank none talk to me like this - in a normal voice that's full of life, zest and quirkiness!

I like the brand feel of Ning...Here's the post in 48 hours for Ning...Never wrote one for my bank or the credit card, etc.

I guess as we step into this new age/ digital lifestyle era, brands even while they ride mass media vehicles need to have a human voice. Stuffiness of the analog, hierarchy driven marketing era won't get brands love marks from customers!!

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...

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!

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

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!

Friends on the Rise, Brand Friendship on the Wane(?)

Read this interesting piece on 'Survival of Friendship' on the Edge.org site!

It led me thinking!

1. Friendship isn't dying out: it's just changing, adapting to the changes in the world. As a boy and as a young man or even 5 years back, there were not too many friends I had. I was a relatively quiet kind of guy. Self/work obsessed and quite boring. But the internet and the blogosphere is gradually changing that.

There are many more people that I open upto now. Hey, I feel I am reasonably extrovert in my virtual skin. It appears that the medium is changing my persona. After more than 3 decades, my buddy list is finally growing:-)

2. I today have friends whom I know only through e-mail/ chats who are as dear to me as my school friends; friends from my first job! And the funny thing is that geography and physical contact are not as important as I thought they would be!

3. This Edge piece also talks about - Throughout our lives we collect and store information about specific individuals, so that — just in case we ever run into them again — we will know how to act. We even store information about people we have never met and whose faces we have never seen.

However, when it comes to brands, I feel marketers and advertisers devote far too much time on consistency and repeating the boring facts everyone already knows. Whereas, if we want the friendship of people/ consumers, we must tell them, engage them with small tidbit about the brands. No coincidence that the best brands have a rich heritage and lots of small stories!

4. Many mobile service brands/ many brands(in general) in India talk about customer friendliness. But when they send their bill statements or the bill alerts or even supposedly personlised communication, the tone and voice are not that of a friend.
It's that of a self-obsessed manufacturer, an aggressive marketer or just a stiff uncaring voice!

Quite a few Indian brands have an impersonal voice(if they have a distinct one at all!!). I feel, they quickly need to loosen up in this new brand world! Because the eyeballs are:-)

5. Till the time we don't give up our obsession with war terms - target/ captive audience, capturing market share, etc., we will have a tough time making brand friends.

So it is ironical that while people are opening upto total strangers and making friends, brand friendship(at least in India) appears to be on the wane...Brand relationships are increasingly transaction-oriented despite the hype created by ads.

P.S. One notable exception in 2006 - the new age brand/concept 'Couchsurfing.com'

Grey Worldwide - Life not the Agency

While flipping through the India Today Special Issue(Jan 8 - 2006 Year of Remixes),these two images struck me most! And once again there was this acute sense of realisation that no part of our world/ brand world is black and white any more. Just about everything is a shade of grey...

For many years now, grey has been the dominant colour of popular culture. And in most of the lingering images of 2006, it's position in our lives and in mass media has been cemented.

1. Sanjay Dutt, the likeable star(the 'bechaara son' of Sunil Dutt and Nargis) of the years biggest block-buster-Lage Raho Munnabhai and the proponent of Gandhigiri is actually facing conviction under TADA! Similar fate awaits the darling of the Bollywood fraternity- Salman Khan...

2. News TV, founded on the values of 'Sabse Tej', 'Sach Dikhate Hain Hum', Haqeeqat Jaisi, Khabar Waisi' has actually become 'Tamasha TV in it's relentless lust for TRPs and sticky eye-balls.

So, every jhatka of a dance bar girl, the macabre child deaths in Noida, the unfortunate fall of a boy in a ditch make for 'Breaking News' and high-decibel coverage!
News TV is the new grey zone between reportage, activism, sensationalism and ludicrousness!

3. Politics has always been in the grey zone of 'criminalisation' and 'vote bank politics'

4. Prime time entertanment(saas-bahu serials) has been in the grey zone of 'slick-and-high-decibel-marketing, 'idiocy', idea-bankrupcy' and 'regressive themes'.

5. The newspaper brand that starts the year with a 'Let there be light' slogan ends the year with 'I will get into scandals' resolution!! It's a strange variegation of light and darkness here. LOL

6. Colas have now been in the grey zone of glamour, pesticide controversy and credibility-under-question celebrity endorsements.

7. Consumer behaviour has been in the grey zone of 'brand indifference' and brand-slutness as Marian Saltzman calls it!

8. Companies are invading the blogosphere as well. Flogs-fake blogs are grey!
Few silly corporate attempts to penetrate Youtube, myspace, orkut are grey marketing examples...

Funny, how living in this 'Grey World' we still create 'pure' brand worlds/ brand keys and virtuous brand values laundry list...

Fig. The ad for Suzlon in ET today(the wind energy guys). Look at the pure world they are alluding to. A world that today exists only within the glossy pages of a magazine often not read!!(Suzlon is here just a representative example.)

- Would a grey world need a new brand thinking lens?

- What would today's kids call grey when they grow up?
Will it matter then?

- Will grey work in the long term or will there be a backlash...

- What is the threshold limit/ boundary of a grey world?

-Is this a meaningless question in an India Poised(the new TOI campaign) - that's drunk on its youthful exuberance, new found envy from the West and a general middle class(biggest market) self congratulatory mood?

- Once again Bollywood found its grey icon long before corporates or advertsing did. SRK in his various roles in movies like Darr, Baazigar, Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa, Don2 has been the Grey Baadshah for a decade now...

The public has accepted him. Will the consumer do the same? And aren't they anyways the same:-)

Guys, if you get the time do rack your grey matter on the grey world!

Related Post : McHealth and Brand Grey Zone

Brands as Conversations

There is I guess a lot of literature on the importance of conversations in today's participative media! However, I generally find Indian advertising professionals lacking in this skill. Perhaps years of schooling in
one-way communication(top down, manufacturer to consumer) has led to a gradual attenuation of conversational skills!

So when I came across this brilliant book Fierce Conversations, by Susan Scott, thought must share some of the learnings!

Here they are in no particular order...

1. Remove the word but from your vocabulary and substitute the word and. Most people are shocked to discover how many times they use the word but during the course of a day.

Ad agencies are places with lots and lots of conversations. Endless cups of coffee, endless bouts of conversations. They are also the stuff that lead to maximum learning. Conversations - between creatives and planners, between clients and account handlers, between mainstream and 360, etc. Therefore replacing the buts with ands becomes quite significant.
Many a time I am not listening to others POV. Need to substitute more of my buts with ands...!!

2. We may succeed in hearing every word yet miss the message altogether.Often I find that in the hurriedly convened FGDs and meetings, we are more intent in hearing the words and often fail to listen to the underlying message...

3. Come into the conversation with empty hands. Bring nothing but yourself.
A fundamental rule which we so often forget!

4. Sometimes we put so many pillows around a message that the message gets lost forever.
In our bid to please the client, we put so many pillows, we end up not saying what we would want to. What is right for the brand/ client!

5. There are things our gut knows long before our intellect catches on.
However, in real life most times we try to force our intellect on our gut!

6. A careful conversation is a failed conversation.
Aren't all brand conversations carefully crafted. Are they largely failures? How many fierce conversations do you have in a month/ quarter/ year?
When was the last time? With whom?

7. Never mistake talking for conversations.
Are most brands just talking?
In love with their own voice...
Not bothering to hear what the consumer wants to say, wants to hear!
Have you noticed how most of the ad copy is full of stuff like - "We make your dreams come true", "We take you places", "We help you get faster, higher".
There are far fewer examples of "Lets make things better"

8. Do not begin your comments with "Truthfully..." or "Frankly..." or "Honestly..."
That sometimes gives the impression that you were not truthful, frank or honest before...
The same holds true everytime a brand says 'New Improved', 'Trust me', 'With you all the way'.

9. The conversation is not about the relationship. The conversation is the relationship!
Reminds me of the 'Reliance' bill reminders for payments which read - Dear Subscriber, please pay your bill on time to avoid disconnection. Your relationship is valuable to us. :-)

10. Companies and marriages derail because people don't say what they are really thinking.
Same is true of brands as well...

What role can a planner have in crafting conversations when he/she doesn't write the final copy? It's just words...and if the words and the tone don't match between the brief and the final copy...all the conversational nuances are lost...

Which brings me back to my favourite topic. The new partnership must be between the planner and the creative/ copywriter. It's not necessary. But this is an easier, more effective, more rewarding way(at least for the planner) to craft brand conversations.

There is a UK coffee brand(forget the name) that has a highly conversational tone and ethos! Let me dig its name...

Which/ who is the most conversational brand in India? MTV? Karan Johar? Blogger.com? Sony TV? Bigg Boss?...

Do write your own experiences with planning, crafting brand conversations. Can you call them conversations? Or are they still monologues? Largely...

Greenpeace and Guerrilla Marketing

Mumbai has been witness to the guerrilla tactics of Greenpeace last fortnight! The Greenpeace pirates as they are called went to the Churchgate Mocha, MMK college(Bandra) and elsewhere changing filament bulbs with CFL ones...The cause - cut down on electricity consumption in the city! This guerrilla tactic is the most creative campaign I have seen this month!

My own encounter was a brief 5 min chat with a Greenpeace volunteer some days back!

The cause - Greenpeace struggle to convince BMC to change all the filament bulbs with CFL. CFL consumes some 5 times less power and lasts 10 times longer!
No hype, no hard-sell. The commitment Rs. 150 per month.

Greenpeace exists because our fragile Earth deserves a voice. It needs solutions. It needs change. It needs action.

India's Fastest Growing Brand

My college friend Ram who runs a boutique travel agency - soulitudes, often helps me step out of my routine, regimented life/ comfort zone. Ram, thanks for it! I have always come back from those experiences richer, humbler with the mind having expanded just that little bit extra!

So, yesterday morning when he called me to attend an 'Art of Living'(AOL) gathering with the added bait of 'Shanker Mahadevan', I fell for it.

It was worth the effort. I always had this feeling of AOL being a fast growing new-age spiritual brand. But first-hand experience is a different ball game.

The event was held at BKC grounds. It had about 30-40K believers, and few odd interested by-standers like me! The event itself resembled a spiritual loan mela:-) With the usual bells and whistles and pestering spiritual salesmen/women!

While I was there, just jotted some pointers on AOL. It's based on a very limited understanding of the organisation. So, don't pin me down if my analysis is wide off the mark:-)

Branded Spirituality
1. AOL is a new age brand. An example of Capitalism with a Conscience
/Cause Marketing . Evangelism is an integral part of their marketing communication...

AOL practices 'Believer gets believer' instead of Member-Get-Member':-). The brand bond is 'the art of living'. A brand which is dedicated to serving society by strengthening the individual.

So while most marketers choose to stay away/ pay lip-service to the larger issues concerning society/India, AOL is busy raising money for the dying farmers in Vidarbha!

2. Global Indian Brand . It's more Indian and more global than Mr. Mittal's steel empire! AOL is one of the largest volunteer based NGOs active in over 140 countries.

It is claimed that AOL is the fastest growing organisation after the UN! There are millions of believers, thousands of active, passionate ones(called teachers in their lingo).

AOL is one of the most multi-faceted organizations in the world and works in special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations.

3. Crossover Brand.. Try slotting AOL into the narrow silo of a product category and it would be impossible. True, they have a flag-ship product/ killer-app called Sudarshan Kriya, sundry other products and services. But AOL is a much larger crossover concept. A remix of 'social/cause marketing' and 'network marketing'. A remix of culture and cause!

4. Amway Model . To my knowledge, AOL is the best Indian adaptation of the in-(famous) Amway network marketing model. At the top of the pyramid is of course Sri Sri! Then there are layers of 'teachers'selling spirituality instead of soaps, cause instead of cosmetics!

5. AOL has the DNA of a 'New Age Brand'. It is collaborative instead of competitive, participative instead of producer-consumer archetype, it uses more of WOM than mass media and the brand is built through communities of belief rather than customer acquisition.

AOL - the organisation has an Al-Qaeda like cell structure rather than a rigid hierarchy. Event marketing is not a BTL activity, its almost the entire marketing!
(A stray comment - Politics is not a bad word for the AOL brand. In fact, AOL actively seeks and gets political patronage. Vilas Rao Deshmukh was present at the ceremony last night!)

6. Brand Communication . And how does the fastest growing Indian brand communicate with its audience! Not the conventional way!

It hasn't needed a 30 sec commercial till date! Instead it has used the CEO as 'Spiritual Guru'. Forget celebrity Endorsement- 'AOL' uses half of Bollywood as endorsers( that too for free) ...

It is quite in-tune with the times when it comes to 'co-branded activities' and collaborative Marketing( sample the Tata Indicom promo leaflet in the pix).

It's more into youth marketing and on a wider plane than many youth brands in the country. Sample this. AOL is organising India's largest youth marketing festival - with over 100,000 students on 24th Dec in Mumbai. Check the details at http://yuvaratri-night.blogspot.com!

After last evening's brief encounter/ interface with AOL, I feel there is much for us agency people and marketers to learn from this alternate brand. It is using all the strategies and tactics of marketing 2.0. In fact AOL is ahead in thinking than most of us, while we may blissfully slot it as a subaltern marketer/ organisation!

Looking forward to comments, suggestions, barbs et al!

couchsurfing.com - Welcome to Concept Brands

I know this brand or shall I say concept for precisely 12 hours now. And I have already interacted with it 6 times! Have spent $25 online(it's significant for me as this is just my 2nd online payment!!). Emailed to an existing consumer/ experiencer/ concept buyer of this brand.

More on couchsurfing.com. It's a non-profit web based company. CouchSurfing.com helps you make connections worldwide. You can use the network to meet people and then go and live in other members' homes! When you surf a couch, you are a guest at someone's house. They will provide you with some sort of accommodation, a penthouse apartment or maybe a back yard to pitch your tent in. Stays can be as short as a cup of coffee, a night or two, or even a few months or more. When you offer your couch, you have complete control of who visits. The possibilities are endless and completely up to you.

At 8:25 am I did not know of this concept. At 8:30 am I first chanced upon the brand in the DNA( actually it was Shilpi). At 8:45, I hooked onto the internet and checked out the web-site. At 9:00, I had e-mailed Arvind Sengupta, an Indian who is living in Vienna for the past three years and a member of CS!

At 9:15 am, I was copying my 16-digit Visa code into the payment page. I willingly put $25 into the CS concept(brand). Equal to an years supply of soaps and detergents from HLL the trusted FMCG brand!

At about 1:30 pm, while surfing again, I edited by profile. The site asks you to answer some profound, meaningful questions. And not just how many credit cards you own and other bugging Qs. So, I filled my mission on life, what learning I have had till now and what I do to earn a living...The profile is still incomplete and I made a mental note of going back to couchsurfing.com later!

At, around 6:00 pm, I was being the couchsurfing.com spokesman with my friend Suman! I felt I knew it better than my 2 year old tooth-paste brand 'Meswak' and my 8 year old TV brand LG Golden Eye(maybe unfair comparisions, but nevertheless).

It reminded me of what John(Grrant) had written in hisOct 10 post. Post Modern brands being ideas not products and standing for something!

Back to 8:45pm, couchsurfing.com is important enought to be my day's post.

Stray thoughts then on concept brands.
1. They exist in the mind. They excite us and invite enthusiastic particpation as John says!
2. They don't have nationalities. Or manufacturing dates. Or expiry dates. Or packaging in the conventional sense.
3. If you buy into the concept. They can be trusted immediately. They grow exponentially and not sequentially. Unlike a bar of soap interacted sequentially through the monthly grocery list.
4. No fancy ads required. No ad agencies...
5. They have a conversational tone. There are people behind the brand not companies.
6. The core of the brand is a concept. Not a one-line chiselled, much debated proposition. No tag-lines needed either.
7. No company owns the brand. A community does.
8. You can belong to the brand and the brand belongs to you from day one. More importantly, you want to belong!
9. It doesn't preach you. You learn and preach and reach(out).
10. The brand makes you feel good. It expands you. You want to explore.

Interesting, how much I want to talk about this 12( well 12 and a half) hour old concept(brand).

Anais Nin had once said that 'When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.' It's time now to think about brands not only through the narrow lens of product( largely FMCG) and service brands that we have worked with, read and internalised case studies. It's time to expand our world-view to include post modern concept brands!

In this new era, looks like we will have to unlearn all of what we learnt about brands! Exciting times ahead!

Nu Lngvg Of Brndng

A while ago, I had written about some words losing meaning..., I carry on from there...

There are some brands that have started to create a language of there own. Case in point being Motorola, iPod, Absolut...

Razr(Razor) is the third most popular hand-held device in the history of man-kind after iPod and the Blackberry. Launched in end 2004, sales are 50m strong! But razor was no branding fluke from Ed Zander's stable...The branding continues with SLVR(silver) - the slim candy bar shaped alternative to RAZR's clamshell design, the KRZR(crazer), a narrower version of the RAZR that went on sale in America last week. The PEBL(pebble) - With chic simplicity, this subtly stylish Moto adds a calming convenience to one's everyday travels( that's what the web-site says...)

Motorola's next move is a new range of phones called SCPL(scalpel) - a low cost slim line phone aimed at customers in the developing world.

1. This branding nomenclature has an indelible 'moto' stamp on it.
2. The transition from 'Motorola' to 'Moto' itself is a brilliant cross-over from the old and techy world to the youthful energy of design and consumer lingo!
3. It's cooler and more relatable compared to the number science of Nokia( okay they have Vertu and stuff)
4. The nomenclature sums up 'mobile world-views'- razr, pebl, scpl, etc.
5. It provides a language and grammer of communication which stands apart.
6. It's a word and visual short-hand...

Similarly, the iPod has invented an eco-system around 'i' - itunes, iphones, italk, ithis, ithat, ieverything...

On surface, the Absolut strategy looked deviant and a one-off - that of grammatically incorrect brand names and sub-branding(Rasberri, Citron, Vanilia...)But you notice them, remember them, talk about them and they stand aprt in the vodka world! And there's the classic master of the trade- McLanguage!

It's a smart move. To invent new brand languages. Some other abused letters are 'X'( xtra, xtreme, now the Titan xylys - it already might be too late, too little) and 'e'( the entire internet and info e-brigade brands)

But the trick again is to be a lil deviant and the first to start a trend.

I am betting on 'y' - yNow, yGiveup, yBranding, y360, yTV, yDiscount, yBull-shit, ySlog, yBlog, yWork, yCricket, yIndia... hmmm yNot

The CEO as Brand Ambassador

Read an article on the subject in the Indian Management- Oct issue

The following sketchy ideas and examples were traded:

1. The CEO as the rescuer of the beleaguered brand(eg. Rajeev Bakshi and Pepsi)
2. Source credibility of such campaigns
3. From Vijay Mallaya to the MDH masala owner, a wide array of CEOs have tried to be the face of their companies with varying degrees of success.

I have my set of thoughts on the subject. Not in any particluar order.

a. The game is about a long term commitment. One can't just play superman saviour or 'CEO as post-it' in times of crisis.

When a Narayan Murthy gets into the Bangalore city management committee, he is believable. When a Rahul Bajaj speaks his mind, he is listened to. But the MDH masala CEO is reduced to a patriarchal caricature in his TVCs. At times, Vijay Mallayas' glamour quotient over-shadows his commitment to his brands!

b. CEO brand endorsement is as much about 'Competency Endorsement' as it is about 'Position Endorsement'. When Kiran Majumdar Shaw talks about bio-tech and its role in the Indian economy, we believe her, but Rajeev Bakshi might be looked at sceptically when he becomes the defence lawyer for Pepsi!

Why should I believe you now? Where were you earlier? What's your POV as a consumer on the risks of pesticide contamination?

c. PR has a bigger role to play than image-based communication. The right environment, a POV on larger macro issues, thought leadership and the subtlety of messaging are required to make CEO-brand-ambassadorship work better.

d. It's more about long term strategic communication than short-term tactical usage and gains.

e. The CEO must find his own style, voice, tonality and the preferred medium. I can expect Narayan Murthy or Azeem Premji maintaining his own blog as the Infosys/ Wipro 'Thought Architects'. Even Biyani on retail would be quite credible!

f. CEOs' deeds are more important than their words. I would prefer Ratan Tata over Mukesh Ambani even though the latter is the recipient of the 'ET Businenessman of the Year award 2006'.

g. Obviously, it won't work for companies where CEO tenureships are short.

We as agencies again largely do not have an opinion on the subject. Even when we do have, our distance from the corner office is directly proportional to our say on the subject. Pity, because in a wired, connected and warp-speed changing world, CEO as brand ambassadors assume great importance!