FESTIVE MARKETING: OPPORTUNITY OR MYTH

Festive season in India is started from October/ dusehhra to diwali. In this period of time companies launch number of product offers with various schemes and entertainment industry i.e bollywood also wait for this point of time every year and launch various various mega budget movies with the expectation of huge returns.

According to various experts, it’s a right to lift shopping spirits of customers with various creative offerings. Companies i.e. FMCG, auto, liquor, apparel and even services - are rolling out the strategies that they have been planning for months in advance, to get a share of the consumers wallet.

These days with emerging mall concept anytime we can see discount offers in almost every product or service offerings either its garments, mobiles, movies (malls-weekdays offers). Consumers are lapping up the smells and sounds of the festivities and willing to pay for shopping due to customs, trend etc , companies have already gone into overdrive with their marketing blitzkrieg.

According to one analysis, Till a couple of years back almost 40% of the annual sales of many companies used to come from the festive season. But not anymore. Today the festive season contributes only 20-25% of the total sales of most companies.

Today we Indians are start celebrating number of festivals like mother’s day, father’s day, friendship day, valentine day etc and we Indian customers now concentrating more on western festival than our typical festivals like”EID”, “DIWALI”, “DURGA PUJA”, ”CHRISTMAS” etc, so companies are now concentrating on proportionate sales throughout year.

Trend of buying behavior of individuals is changing with the purchasing power and nuclearism. Initially few years back we were mainly concentrating on our traditional festivals and went for shopping for whole family but now everyday is shopping.

Trends:

• Various festive offers i.e. mother’s day, father’s day, friendship day, valentine day and with these our traditional festivals i.e. ”EID”, “DIWALI”, “DURGA PUJA”,”CHRISTMAS”.
• New offerings and assured gifts instead of banking on the concept of giving discounts on their products or holding lucky draws during this particular season.
• Personal gifting.

Marketing Director at Diageo India, Santosh Kanekar, attributes it to changing gifting patterns of the consumer. He says, “True to the elegance of brands such as Johnnie Walker and Smirnoff we have pushed the scope of gifting a few notches higher. For instance, we have introduced the Johnnie Walker Red Label Vodafone F1 festive pack, the Black Label comes with a vintage wooden twin pack, and brands such as Smirnoff Black and Captain Morgan are coming with shakers and chocolates respectively.”

Trend is changing even though some marketing managers believe that traditional festive time is very good for companies to launch its new products and increase its market penetration.

Motorola Inc, Whirlpool, Lenovo, Hyundai Electronics, Maharaja Whiteline and Sony India are going ahead with their festive plans. Hyundai Electronics has earmarked a budget of Rs 5 cr; Sony has set aside $10m for the season, Maharaja Whiteline would be spending 60% of its promotional budget during this period. Sukhpreet Singh, General Manager, brand marketing, Whirlpool Of India sums it up aptly. Mr Singh says, “Though we have sales coming in throughout the year, the festival season spike is very much a reality.”

Automobile companies like Maruti Udyog, Hyundai Motors India and Honda Siel Cars India are also running marketing campaigns that offer discounts, loyalty bonuses and gift cheques.

Even retailers also believe that it’s a right time to promote and push your product and brand. Subhiksha a big brand name spending huge on marketing and advertising. Company have special offers on crackers, fruits and new range of mobile phones.

various web portals and Internet services offered diwali bonanza offers on chatting, voice chat etc.

I personally believe that its good that we are following new trends and culture but still we markerters believe that these festive season really matters in sales and revenue of companies.

To check out various offers from different companies click on below links:

VIDEOCON offer in Hyderabad

LG offer for Internal customers i.e. channel partners

Offers from CAR manufacturers

Thanks for visiting..........

PASSIONATE MANAGER

BRANDING Vs ADVERTISING

Marketing includes N-number of functions like sales management, branding, Public relations, Advertising, Customer care etc.

• Branding and advertising do they work simultaneously ?

• Which is more important and why?

Advertising: Promote yourself with all your value added features

Branding: Recognize one product/brand by others (customers) on the basis of logo, name or symbol.

In case of Airtel ads like “dadu chess wala” emphasize on emotional feelings of Indians and importance of proper communication. At this point of time company pushing its product to customers while in case of branding customers recommendation, acceptance, attachment with the company from customers side.

Advertising play a crucial role in brand building, if we take an example Sprite its advertisement click the market for it otherwise its bit difficult for any new product to set its image in customer’s mind especially when colas are on everyone tongue.

Another example BINGO, when it was launched in april-may this year nearly 90% market was captured by Frito Lays and its first time for any Indian company to launch on national level with 32 variants, but that the advertising which generates the eagerness among customers about BINGO. & many more

Now I am contradicting my point that advertising not always required to establish yourself. There are very few examples are there like ARAVIND EYE HOSPITAL, Private labels and (now) cigarettes & liquor etc (right now I am unable to recall other brands which established without advertising ). Even today when mass media advertisement are banned for cigarettes & liquor they are enjoying the same brand equity. The medium of maintaining its equity is buzz, creativity and much more.

Today, Brand Managers are trying to reinvent themselves and discover for themselves new paths to tread. Just imagine for yourselves that a massive mass-media purge has just occurred. A selective atom bomb has decimated every form of mass-media advertising for you. How would you approach your prospect consumer?

The answer will dawn on you then... ... .in many a creative format.

There certainly is life after death! Life after the death of mass-media advertising for your brand!

Have a check out the video link and imagine the innovative concepts applied by Virgin airways, IKEA & VODKA….

http://www.adage.com/video/Player?spotId=1288&instanceId=&startId=&
PageDate=&PageTitle=',578,500

Innovative ideas, creativity leads advertising agencies to think beyond traditional periphery of ads to maintain unique image among your customers.

To check out your creativity, can you create an one minute advertisement to promote parker pen

Conditions: No celebrity endorsement, cheapest, original ….

Related Articles:

RIGHT NAME IS GOOD WAY TO START

IS ADVERTISEMENTS ITSELF THE USP?

BRAND PERIODIC TABLE

ADVERTISING & ITS NEGATIVE RECALL

LACK OF SWITCHING EFFECTS IN ADVERTISING

Thanks for visiting..........

PASSIONATE MANAGER

Self Assessment

There is a curiosity about ourself , especially when one is highly confused and in indecisive state about him/herself.

In general HR interviews there are some questions like:

• What is your strength & weakness?
• What type of personality you are?

If I ask you that tell me your positive and negative personality traits immediately ?

How you will respond—your eye balls will come out and your mind will start pondering over various instances which reflect your personality, unfortunately if you are unable to answer the question, telling you feel so embarrassing about yourself..

Let me tell you why?

An individual who is not able to identify himself in last 23-25 years how he can understand the business and lead the company or division and generate profits????

Normally what we do to answer these questions:

One can do is he will ask this question from his close friends and pinch them till he don’t get the answer.

Finally one can search for various personality tests “free” which will normally have 60-200 questions.

These personality tests are well furnished and documented but when an individual is searching for snapshot of his personality, these tests are not very good options because they consume huge lot of time.

Here I found one very simple and interesting personality test which takes 1-10 minutes depending upon the decisive power of an individual.

Link for the test : hit me

Very simple procedure:

Open the link given below the picture in new tab and prepare yourself for test

Just choose the pattern which appeals most to you and this test will tell all about your personality.

Test over!!!!!

As per experience, I felt it’s a real picture of my thought process.

Now its your turn..

Lets have look ….

Share your experience with me about this personality test.

Thanks for visiting..........

PASSIONATE MANAGER

Corporate Blogging: A TRUTH

In last article we have seen what is corporate blogging & how its spreading among companies.

According to Technorati report, in one year corporate blogging increased by 330% which itself shows a huge upthrust is there in it. Today, in every company almost 20% of its marketing budget spend on new ways of promotion like blogs etc. With the increasing demand of blogs as Public Relation, there are number of ways adopted by companies to promote its unique image, products, queries & suggestions etc.

According to Marketing Profs analyst David Felfoldi, six types of blogs prevails in corporate blogging, each one has its own importance.

1. Corporate Newsroom

2. Product blog

3. Developer/channel partner Blog

4. Event/promotional blog

5. CEO/ thought- leader blog (Jason Calacanis of Sequoia Capital)

6. Company evangelist (Matt Cutts, a well-known blogger who works at Google)

7. Internal blogs

Answer of last post are:

Code of conduct: actually its not well defined some of blog experts said that it should be formal but what I thought that if you are initiating something for PR & sifting traffic from your web portal to your blog then code of conduct should be informal and interactive because if the users who posted comments will not be satisfied, they will not come back & share anything with you.

Handling of blogs: as above mentioned there are six major type of corporate blogs and each blog is handle by one senior manager of the deptt. i.e.

· product blog- it will be handled by product development deptt.

· Company evangelist: these blogs are handled by senior level mangers who have lot of experience in particular field because the visitors on this blogs are also well known experts in particular field, so expect quality answer of their queries.

· CEO blog: these blogs are directly taken care by CEOs himself.There is a list of few international & national CEOs

International CEOs

Indian CEOs

Rajesh Jain, CEO of Netcore

Dr. Vivekanand P Kochikar Associate Vice President and Principal Consultant - KM, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

George Eby Mathew Principal & Head of IT management Research, at Infosys

Dina Mehta, Explore Research & Consultancy

Most amazing fact I have seen was government departments of various countries also have their blogs.

Indonesia: Juwono Sudarsono, Minister of Defense

Iran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President

United Kingdom: David Miliband, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

Andrew Wadge, Chief Scientist, Food Standards Agency

United States: Department of Defense

Few days back, I was shocked by seeing India blog& india blogs which contains the database of best Indian blogs with various categories i.e. CEO’s blog, marketing blogs, personal blogs etc. It has database of few thousand of Indian blogs which shows that there is huge growth in Indian blogging sector too.But on the other side if we see Indian comscore report which shows that Internet penetration in India is meagre 3% , around 2.2 crore people out of 1,129,866,154 population (till july 2007).

Benefits of corporate blogging:

1. quickly giving consumers company updates,

2. allowing for open feedback with consumers, and

3. inclusion in search engine indexes, and thus possible increased traffic.

4. Online newsletter with community feedback i.e. ICFAI stockyard (it has no blog but have its forum), google press centre.

5. Information sharing

Have you ever think about the negatives of blogging?

Thanks for visiting..........

PASSIONATE MANAGER

Corporate Blogging: New PR tool?

Today personal writing become professional, initially when this blogging introduced it was for passionate writers but now this blogging takes new turn and become Public Relation (PR) tool.

According to Susane M healthfield (HR expert@ about.com): “What sets blogs apart from other online writing … is their dynamic nature (as opposed to static Web pages) and their voice (style).” The voice of the writer (or writers) of the blog, in a successful blog, is unique to that blog.

In her article, she mentioned seven reasons for starting corporate blogs in detaled manners. Today companies are so much customer centric they are trying to involve lot of customer intraction in product development to meet customer demands. So, companies conduct no. of pilot tests, focus groups, brain storming session etc to know about customers demand, perception, requirements etc… Now blogging help companies in similar & in more refined way. When any new product launch or customer faced any problem retaled to company product he/she can directly communicate to the company professional through the corporate blogs & another most important feature of corporate blogging is company time to time updates about its usage, features & new changes in varity of products.

There are no. of companies in European union which are using “ corporate blogging” as PR tools because it’s a informal communication between customers & companies just like communities & forums. There is partial of companies which are using corporate blogging as PR tool in EU.

According to wiki corporate blog research only 8% (40) of the fortune 500 companies were blogging till (may/2006). In one year, corporate blogs increased to 132 (till june/2007).

Check out the list:

In india when pulsar was launched there was dedicated community of “BAJAJ PULSAR” owners and there in the community they discuss about the features, market response, individuals’ reaction for new pulsar. The interesting thing in that community was that it was started by company employee itself to know about the views & reaction of “BAJAJ PULSAR” owners. Same experiment is done by HONDA motors when it launched “ UNICORN” in India, in the initial phase of launch Indian customers were worrying about the mono-suspension in the bike, so company used community as PR tool to promote its utility & benefits from UNICORN users(innovators).

In India, there are some companies which are using blog as PR tool for its PR & promotions: Some of them are given below:

Tata Interactive Systems

ebay India

Tekriti Software

Score India

Now in india majority of population thought that it’s a boring, non effective & cumbersome medium to promote yourself(company).But Sun microsystem promoting blogging among all its employee than any other company in the world, according to the company 3000/32000 emplyees have their own blog and company CEO have corporate blog there are no. of vistors, third party developers visit company blog.

ISSUES:

Code of conduct , what should be the mode of communication (formal or informal)?

Who will look after these corporate blog i.e. entry level managers, middle level managers or Senior mangers?

THANK YOU

PASSIONATE MANAGER

Blog Sphere & its achievers

Blogging become a passion for writers, techies, editors, students etc. Here on blog one can explain his/her love, passion even anxiety against anyone. Its your personal web page and you have full right to write whatever you want to write.

World Blogsphere:

There are number of bloggers who do blogging but if you ask him that that who is world most famous blogger, he will get stuck----“ Unfortunatelly I was that person who don’t know about such important facts”. It’s a bad impression because if you are doing some very passionately then you should know about its evolution, achievers etc. To avoid such setback for you & me once again I am giving you a glimpse of veterans of BLOGSPHERE.

Lets look at world TOP 10 Bloggers and their job descriptions:

Start from bottom:

No. 10: Mr. Brain Lam – (Technology blog)- popular gadget blog Gizmodo - . 40-50 posts daily.

N0. 09: Mrs. Gina Tarapani- (technology blog)- Gina’s blog

No. 08: Ariana Huffington- (political blog)-The Huffington Post

No. 07: Mark Frauenfelder- (writer’s blog)Boing Boing

No.06: Pete Rojas- (gadget blog) - Engadget

No.05: Joi Ito- (techie blog)- just look at the profile of such personality…Joi’s blog

No.04:Jason Calacanis- (popular personality of Internet)-direct publicly attacking on founder of dig.com Mr. Kevin Rose -Jason’s blog

No. 03: David Sifry- (Founder of technorati.com)-Icon of blogging world- David’s blog

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Waiting for NEXT !!!

No.2: Kevin Rose (founder of dig.com)- Kevin’s blog

Now WORLD’s most famous blogger, god father of blogging……….

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NICK DENTON- Denton is the founder and proprietor of Gawker Media, perhaps the most successful blog network. It includes 14 high-traffic blogs, the largest of them being gadget blog Gizmodo, productivity blog Lifehacker, gaming blog Kotaku and porn blog Fleshbot. He was previously a journalist with the Financial Times.

Denton owns 8 blogs in the Technorati Top 100 list, and has created the most powerful blog empire. His estimated wealth is about $280 million according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2007. While he has downplayed the viability of a blog as a business, many believe that that’s just his way of discouraging competition. With very low costs (including modest wages for staff writers), Denton’s blogging income is guessed to be pretty high. And in total, his blogs have the most links pointing at them. NICK DENTON'S BLOG

Don’t be disheartened that all are foreigners, we Indians are very good in making bypass to achieve success. Lets look at few Indian Bloggers

Trak in – blog on current business movements, if you missed to know about something. You can get full stuff.

Digital Inspiration-1.2 million hits per month, most visited in blog in India. It was started by Mr. Anil Agarwal in year 2004.

Now India’s top bloggers in World TOP 50 BLOGGERS

Neil Patel- Ranked 50 among world top 50 bloggers- Patel has successfully branded himself as one of the top experts on SEO and Internet marketing, including linkbaiting and social media such as Digg or Netscape. This is not only because he finds ways to exploit loopholes in the system to get on the Digg homepage or a high ranking on Google, but because he’s willing to talk about it and share his secrets with others. In addition, he’s done some high-profile publicity, such as publicly challenging Weblogs Inc. owner Jason Calacanis when Calacanis implied that SEO techniques don’t really work — and the high-profile publicity has made Patel one of the top names in the industry.

QuickSprout , Pronet Advertising

Om Malik- ranked 35 among world top 50 bloggers- Malik is a former senior writer for Forbes magazine, one of the original team for Forbes.com, and a former senior writer Business 2.0 magazine. In 2001, he started technology blog GigaOM, which is now in the Top 40 in Technorati. He’s still the editor and chief writer for GigaOM, but he has expanded to form GigaOmniMedia Inc.. Om’s personal blog

It’s a snapshot of world & Indian best bloggers, today when we talked about our blog there was very common reaction from public that Its outdated but I believe If you have creavity, enthusiasm and ability to change with changing market secenario nothing can be outdated…

Blogging is like a business if you have marketing myopia then business will be no more If you have vision, proper strategy and above traits then success will be your next target..

S-Commerce

An innovative concept introduced in India to give dimensions to the service industry & money value to the customers. It’s anew category & brand genre of business model to provide every possible service to the consumer at one place on a single platform called “SUVIDHAA”.

This initiative is developed by Shapoorji Pallonji Group and called as Suvidhaa Infoserve Private Limited.

According to company, IT revolution helped them to develop this concept and but due unavailability of internet across the country, company will introduce “CLICK & MORTAR MODEL”. The SUVIDHAA service will be launce in September, 2007 (in the month of my birth) in 25 cities (tier-1 & tier-2). According to company projections, in next two years this will be available in 75 cities of our country & generate 300000 lacs direct jobs.

An advanced version or prototype of bank’s “single window system” & Andhra government’s unified bill payment model- “e seva” & “mobile shop” joint venture of ESSAR & Virgin mobile . Under one roof, consumers will get the service related to travel (roadways, airways etc), telecommunication, education, telemedicine, entertainment, utilities, finance, sales, job opportunity, e-governance, life style, bill payment etc which are prime & basic requirement of ours.

SUVIDHAA will have three tier distribution network:

1. SUVIDHAA flagship stores (company owned)
2. SUVIDHAA points (neighbor convenience store)
3. Shop-in-Corporate model.

Shop-in-Corporate model is really an interesting model in which company will generates & maintains key Corporate Accounts for companies and their employees.

The issue is does this concept is viable in Indian context where less than 10% people access internet & have huge set of demands and vast geography.

LETS WAIT & WATCH……………..