Novice Poker Effect

It had been a while since I had been sent out of a classroom… the last time this happened, I think It was in the OOPs lab in 2008, well teachers wouldn’t get offended that easily in UVCE I guess... anyway it was an interesting class of rural marketing and I seemed to be interested, but sadly I was caught fiddling with the phone and making some kinda tattoo on my hand and the teacher took offence at it and pushed me out of the class. But what I was googling about was the Myths involved in Rural Marketing. I’m not gonna bore you with what I found, heres a snap shot. 

Something I remember from class held my attention for a long time. The prof had said ‘One of the biggest myths about rural marketing is that the marketers think we rural buyers don’t ask many questions, they ask more questions than urban buyers, they are smarter than the urban buyer. They sometimes ask questions that seem silly and make you laugh, but we fail to find answers to such questions and that’s what makes rural marketing more challenging.’

Yes, we’ve heard this being said a lot of times. It’s almost a cliché. But something doesn’t fit right, does it? How could rural buyers with less exposure and information about what’s happening be harder to outsmart? Why would they be harder to sell to? Why do they ask harder questions? Why are they tougher to convince? Do they know what we’re trying to do from before? Not really. I like to call it, The Novice Poker Effect.

It happened roughly 2 years ago; out of boredom I decided to teach my cousin how to play poker and tried to play him a little. I couldn’t read him, I couldn’t bluff him, I thought he bluffed when he played simple and I obviously lost. The reason is simple. A novice poker player is not playing you, he is just playing his cards. It’s the same with Rural Marketing, a rural buyer is just playing what’s on his cards, he isn’t bothered about what or why a marketer is trying to sell. 

We could conclude that a rural buyer is not smart; he’s just like a novice poker player. Hard to read, hard to pick up trends and hard to know what he wants. It’s this Novice Poker Effect that makes us think a rural buyer is smart. If we understand that the rural buyer just looks at things from his side and dont try anything fancy against him, we would succeed. 

So to round it up, learn to play poker with a kid, maybe you’ll excel in rural marketing.

A Crowd In Hand

The last time I experienced Delhi winter I thought it was overrated and the 16 of Bangalore was colder than the 4 of Delhi. I accounted this to the wind speed and altitude difference. This time however the winter already seems cold. Maybe because I’ve been living in Delhi for a little over 4 months and pretty much accustomed to the windless oven. Now I see people leaving for home earlier, shops shutting down earlier, the sun shying away faster and a dead silence descending over the night.

  It was the silence of the cold Friday night. I heard a railway horn blow at a distance. The line was about 1200 – 1500 meters away and would’ve been inaudible if it were not winter. It was in this silence that kept me awake. I finally decided to watch the movie Lucia.

 

I think it was August 2013, when I suddenly started seeing all these posts from on FB about how awesome Lucia is and surprisingly, I BMS-ed  it and what do you know! A PVR in one of the malls of Gurgoan was actually showing Lucia. I didn’t have a lot of company to go watch it, I had found zero Kannadigas and my friends of Delhi weren’t really interested. This wouldn’t have happened if you’re in Bangalore. I’ve been dragged and I’ve dragged my friends to movies of the languages we didn’t follow, but it was fun and it happens often in Bangalore.  

Anyway this post isn’t about language. It’s about the concept of crowd funding. The introduction credits of Lucia movie said that it’s the first CrowdFunded Kannada movie. I googled a little later and found a news result dated Nov 12, 2013. It said the first Crowd Funded Malayalam movie with a Tamil/Malayalam cast and a Bengali Director would release soon, cool so Kannada is ahead (yay :P) More googling lead to a Reuterspost about the movie. It says the story writer had made a blog post where he said that he had tried to source the movie but had failed for 3 years. Suddenly out of the blue he got 200,000 rupees into his bank account from a lady in UK. More funding from random strangers followed and that’s when they decided to make a movie out of funds from the crowd. 

This idea is ingenious! Kannada film industry of the ‘Sandalwood’ is known for its low budget or its Tamil/Telugu adaptations; Lucia was so big and radical that people said it brought a paradigm shift. Though it was still a low budget movie, it was very well received. The plot of the movie itself is so delicate and complex. The actors did good and the songs were pretty good too. The movie all in all was good, it was also released in Pakistan; the Tribune even put a review of Lucia. Sadly I still don’t think I would find people who would want to try the movie. (it was released with subtitles ofcourse)

Last year I had authored a white paper dealing crowdsourcing for software testing and since then I had started to appreciate the benefits of using a crowd. I read a bit more about crowd funding and the more I read the more I was interested, this idea is already catching up, crowd funded movies were already famous in the west. The next result said Crowd Funded travelling; a site called Trevolta said it would sponsor trips! The idea is simple; travelers post their travel plans and the company tries to sponsor it, the sponsors may be from simply inspired and passionate travelers or marketers sponsoring for marketing use. Whatever the case, you get to go on a trip free of cost! Why wouldn’t it work?? The idea is relatively new and the site has very less right now, but you can check out their FB page just in case (I know free publicity right? They better fund one of my trips :P :D )

I was thinking hard about how to make use of this idea, maybe I could use CrowdFunding to raise capital for my entrepreneurial ideas too… and that’s when it hit me that this is what we do in India! A Ganesh mela or a Durga Puja pandal or holika dahan all happen with crowdfunding! We call it chanda and now we’re giving it a fancy name, come to think of it, it doesn’t seem so radical or big or new idea at all! And today, we have so much money; Banks, Investors and VC’s and ready to give you all the money if you have an idea, and if not these guys then you can just get money from the crowd! What we need is planning, transparency and proper IT integration and we could use CrowdFunding for anything! So... Go! 

Piggybacking? No its just BBM on Android.

In one week I saw more than a hundred people post their BBM pin on their fb timeline. A few of them sent me their Pins on my whatsapp too. Some of my friends asked me what it was and some asked me what my BBM pin was. Well, I’m not gonna install BBM on my phone yet, but I’ve got to say, I’m really surprised.

I tried to look up on it and searched for it on twitter and on google news. Suddenly, BlackBerry is all over the news! The BlackBerry Z10 launch wasn’t even half as famous as this! And it was supposedly the flagship!! It hit me! Piggyback marketing!

 

My friend Akshay had just started freelance photographing for friends. He took small projects like mehandi rituals, children’s portfolio etc., this was one such child portfolio for a friend. He wanted about perfect photos of his 4 year old angel. Akshay had clicked about 6 photos and apparently he wasn’t comfy with the money part. No wants to pay 3K for 6 photos, especially if the photographer is a friend. So I was sent to deliver the photos and extract money from him. Akshay had told me to get atleast 1.5K from him, and also spiced it with the line ‘I’ll give you an envelope, 10% of what you bring from her is yours.’ btw  I was also a friend to that guy mind you. 

I stuck to my guns of praising the baby and telling him how much Akshay would like to work with the baby again. I didn’t ask him for 3K. I just said ‘Akshay sent me here to deliver the photos and collect the money.’  He knew how much he had to pay, if I opened my mouth I would just ruin what’s cooking in his head.   

Did he give 3K? Well you know how we are… He put 2K inside an envelope and wrote something about paying the rest when he comes back for the next session or something. The point is, I was scared, out of place, and so totally awkward about asking money from a friend, but I rode on Akshay. He and his photos were selling high, I just had to cling to him and do the job to collecting. And that’s all I did. Akshay later said that he got much more than what he’d expected and I got well… not the 10% but I learnt Piggybacking. 

Now the main point, Piggybacking is what BlackBerry did unknowingly. More than 10 Million app downloads, twitter and news coverage from all over the world and here’s more, there’s even a scandal about fake app reviews. They couldn’t have got this much publicity even if they’d planned it. 

The concept is again simple, Android is selling high, put BBM on Android and you’re famous again. One line! 

Could this mean the big bosses of BlackBerry will get their heads together and try more piggybacking? Well that depends on how desperate they are. Piggybacking can be a taboo when you’re someone as big as BlackBerry. Wait, what about BBM on Apple? Is that be just as popular? Well people who use Apple already have lots of chat services that are cooler than the average Android messaging apps.. so… we’ll see.

My dearest Nokia tried it with Microsoft windows phone, but you don’t piggyback on something new, you’re pigs gotta be big right? And in case of Microsoft, the problem is Microsoft isn’t doing that great by itself, plus windows phone is new… so it’s like Nokia tried to ride an amputee pig with a new artificial leg! Ok you try making sense of that! Bye :P

Mass Production

This one’s a long overdue post. I had thought of this hmmm… I think about 2 years ago. So we can say that this trend is almost 3 years old now. It’s about this explosion of south Indian movies on hindi tv channels. I was in love with the tamil movie annian. It was dubbed in hindi as aparichit and would premiere on zee cinema every now and then. There were a few others too, Kamal sir’s dasavataram was one such example. 

I was shocked to see that atleast 1 south Indian movie running at any time I surfed about the movie channels, that’s when I thought there was a change, the bollywood audience had grown an appetite for the mass movies of the south. However I could not push myself to write about it as I was a south Indian and I lived in Bangalore, I obviously liked to see those movies, but did the average hindi tongued like them? may they did, but I had to know for myself. 

Upon reaching Delhi I found that people actually enjoyed the movies of the south.  Be it the Action of Chiranjeevi and Sudeep or the romance of Nagarjuna and Surya, or the sizzle of Sada or Trisha, they loved it. People asked me about the names of stars from movies and I could actually see them like it! And that’s why the tv channels ran more and more dubbed south Indian movies.

Soon, one could notice more of Surya, Vijay, allu arjun, Darshan, Sudeep and Chiranjeevi pictures on hindi tv channels. That’s the same time when movies like Ready, Bodyguard, Rawdy rathod and the like came out that had nothing but crazy songs and unreasonably long fight sequences. This was an adaptation of the southern movies, the “mass” movies to be more specific.

 “What’s a mass movie?” I asked moms one day. 

“the ones that bring the masses to the theater” he said as a matter of factly.

“so are all Rajkumar movies are mass movies?”

He obviously was shocked. He cursed me for a little over 10 mins and then said

“see, there are 2 types of movies; Class and Mass. Hmmm… but I’m not sure how to explain… have you seen Jogi? It’s a mass movie, and have you seen Amrutadhare? That’s a class movie.” 

“ok.. so the one with lots of fighting is mass movie and the one with a sensitive story is class?”

“yeah maybe, somewhat like that, mass is what 2 and 3 wheeler owners watch and class is what 4 wheeler owners watch”

“haha.. mental you are moms!” I said and laughed off.. but that’s class and mass movies for you.

Coming back to the topic, we see a lot of such “mass” movies coming out from bollywood these days, since olden days, the mass movie of bollywood was mostly just a headless comedy that drove tons of people into the halls. But since the growth in popularity of Thalaiva and these numerous dubbed movies being liked by the hindi audience, maybe the directors of bollywood realised that it was about time they came to join the “mass” club.

All the best!

Theft at Gandhi's Grave

“Holy day or just a holiday?” I took pride in this poor attempt at cynical pun. Today was a holiday but still I wasn’t happy when I woke up, reason being my father had told me that we would be going to Raj Ghat to see Gandhi’s tomb and pay our respects to him. I wasn’t interested; my mom even resented the idea. 

It was hot but not far. We reached Raj Ghat in less than half an hour. The place wasn’t as crowded as I expected it to be. Not shockingly, Anna Hazare was also present, there was a small contingent of about 50 people around him, then there were tourists; local and foreign, a hoard of school children in Blue and white, and who could miss the loud and happy tamilians. 

The tomb was beautifully flower decorated for the occasion. I could say it was special because there was more than just the Genda Phool that you find everywhere in Delhi. People stood by the tomb, near the flowers, behind the torch and posed at a thousand more places in the 15 X 15 space. Momdad went ahead close to the tomb to offer the fist full of Genda Phool that they had bought at the gate for 10 rupees. I decided to stand this one out, I stood leaning to the parapet wall surrounding the tomb and looked at the crowd. Some offered flowers, some bowed their head and some just wanted to click more and more photos.

Just a couple minutes later I saw my parents panic stricken faces. My mom’s purse had been stolen. A girl had put her hand into my mom’s handbag and had stolen the purse while in the crowd paying respects. We were aghast. Spoke to the security nearby, and looked for the purse hoping to find it fallen nearby, but it was stolen, deliberately and consciously stolen.

I was angry, at mother for being careless, at father for thinking up this useless plan and at myself for not bothering to stick with my mother in a crowd. Then I was angry at the thief, she had stolen right in front of Mahatma Gandhi’s tomb! Such irony!!

It reminded me of a line said by an 18^th century poet, he says “No man can be patriot on an empty stomach” Ofcourse he died 69 years before Gandhi was born. But there was only 1 Gandhi(and there were many other great patriots in history who almost fasted to their death), but the saying holds good for the thief, she was just trying to make a living, steal in front of Gandhi’s grave or from a pretty dame, it was just an attempt to feed herself. 

We spent the whole journey back thinking of what was lost and talking about how we could’ve prevented it and how people have lost their conscience. Stealing in front of Bapu! 6 hours after the incident I was still thinking, not about our loss, but the Gandhi connection. How these values of truth and justice and honesty and everything has turned out to remain just a sound of humbug! I thought about the Irony again and again, Theft right in front of Gandhi’s grave, how ironic how ironic... I said that aloud once.. then silently again. Then it struck me.. this wasn’t ironic, it was symbolic. Theft at Gandhi’s grave.