Right to Piggy Ride

Amul’s comic snippets are loved by everyone. Marketing teachers are especially fond of them. I’m not sure how the professionals see it and what’s the correlation of those cartoons and sales, but it sure does a hell of a job with the TOMA. 

What Amul does is it releases 1 comic per week and whatever happens that week is generally the theme of the comic. So people read the comic, relate to the news, smile to themselves and remember Amul. It’s ingenious, using news to sell yourself. No one calls them cheap or piggy back riders. Same happens to everyone during cricket season, FIFA world cup season etc etc.

So what caught my attention? The new ad of Hero Hf Deluxe.  The ‘Talent’ theme. Here’s the vid.

Hero piggy back rode the elections. Make the buyer of Hf Deluxe look great, intelligent, rational, responsible and so damn patriotic. Oh btw Hero Honda took a dig at being patriotic a million years ago. Ok 8-10 years ago, Remember ‘desh ki dhadkan’ ??  Back when CBZ was new, I think I was in highschool. Bajaj was already famous for its Hamara Bajaj and came up with a new Hamara Bajaj for the new times, beautiful ad, you gotta watch it. Here,

 So, now we have political parties taking it to the tv, online media and stuff, so why not use the elections as a USP? You know play a little with the Consumer’s head, Idea cellular also did that, the new ‘no ullu banao-ing’ thing, ofcouse, Idea has a history of making videos of showing idea users  to be righteous and awesome but this thing about using elections to sell yourself is awesome! TATA tea started with the ‘Jagore’ program almost 6 to 7 years back. 

It’s as the guy says says in the new Hf Deluxe ad, the elections are India’s biggest talent show. How can anyone refrain from making a buck, right?

Take A Look Around

Well, its actually a song, a very famous song actually.. by Limp Bizkit.. Anyway here's a post asking you to do something.

Assuming that I have viewers and readers, I'm gonna post a link to the survey I'm conducting to know stuff about Travel and Tourism.

Its not a school project or an assignemnt that I need to get done, its.. hmmm.. we'll you know me right? I love traveling and it was about time I took some serious interest in it and tried to do something.. you know like start something.. don worry its no entrepreneurial idea.. or atleast not yet.. but its an idea never the less, to understand the traveling habits and a few perceptions.

So take a little breather and gimme10 mins.

Fill out this Form for me ok? You can mail me if your interested in the results, even otherwise I will post it here. So just do this for me ok.. Thanks!

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