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?

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! 

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!

Aasaan Over Assam

The disgrace of Indian Politics shines from the State of Assam this July. More than 40 lives were lost before I came to realize the seriousness of the situation. Thousands devoid of homes, roofs and a village are now being held at refugee camps. Some of the oldest inhabitants of India are now living on bread crumbs and wet canvas over head. 

Just after the Rain Gods showered fury on the people of Assam, the fury of men belittles that of the god’s. The ethnic riots that broke out in the first half of July took me down by surprise. The riot was not the surprise, it was the complete lack of coverage or attention it received from the country that made me raise my brows and then bring down my fist. 

The apathy of the people, the inability of the state government, lack of concern of the central government and the shocking uninterest of the media makes my bones itch. 

The Chief Minister of Assam Tarun Gogoi, is all too very well known in Assam for his vote bank politics. The illegal immigrants from Bangladesh receive a fresh start from Indian soil. Food, shelter, clothing and everything a native would receive is on the menu; for free. The game is simple; the Congress party wants to prove its sovereignty by extending its hand to the Bengali speaking Muslims.  

Out of the 4 states that border with Bangladesh, Assam has the highest number of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. It’s also a fact that Tripura has more incidents of immigrant initiated crimes than Assam; and that the Illegal Bangladeshi immigrants caught in Meghalaya are sometimes sent to Assam. Meghalaya again is ruled by the congress party. One can actually say that Assam’s tolerance to these Bengali Speaking Muslims is a trade off for the congress and congress allies to prove their sovereign intentions. 

To make proposals of a farfetched theory, the acceptance of Muslims into Assam over a hostile communist state of Tripura could have got Mamta Banerjeethe the Muslim vote banks of West Bengal. 

Leaving that apart and focusing on the riot, It haunts me to see that the country is least bothered about what’s happening in Assam. The electronic media in specific is more interested in talking about The 13^th President’s first speech, Anna Hazare’s fast, Indian cricket team and god knows which product Samsung is going to release next. 

The Center Had not bothered to dispatch security forces to the riot affected areas till it was inevitable to turn its head from the fish curry on Pranab’s table. Over that, there are loathful people like Sharad pawar who want to throw threats of destabilizing the government for personal gains. Caught between such unruly allies, swinging knifes of economic slowdown and a blunt Obama and Co. hell bent on driving investors away from India, the central govt hardly has the time or priority to look at Assam.

This lack of action from the governments in deploying security was the sole reason for the elevation of the aggression. The innocent Bodo’s of Assam had to seek help in form of security from the Militants. This might sound drastic, but with no help from any govt body, they had to fend for themselves. Choosing a familiar Devil over an uncertain God is not a hard choice. The consequences of this would be a growth in public sympathy for the militants, Assam, or in general the north east of India has no shortage of militant groups looking for local support. Once with the help of local public if the militants succeed in getting control of the siliguri corridor, then we can kiss the shivalik Himalayas of India a final goodbye. This news however will not be made public, because most of the print and emedia is either on immigrant sympathy mode or politician loyalty mode. Who gives as damn to the people?

My dissatisfaction with the politicians doesn’t end there. I’m also angry at the opposition, when the opposition leaders can pass comments at magazine covers and openly criticize for deaths of pilgrims, then what makes then stay mum at the situation in Assam???

The Answer – BJP doesn’t have a chance of winning an election in the north east. Except for a few distant stars of hope, the north east has been impenetrable for the BJP. Making comments and forcing the government to act won’t win any votes in the congress/communist/regional party bound states of the north east. So the BJP decides to throw small pebbles at congress and not make a real effort at getting things done.

This episode of ethnic/communal or whatever you want to call riots between indigenous Bodos and the refugees is a disgraceful situation for the whole country. The truth about the ineffectiveness of the greed based political system, the powerlessness of the common man, the crooked vote bank politics, and the euphoric media that turns at shiny objects are all evidence of the apathy for the North East of India.  

Just what the separatists need. Proof of disownment.