Understanding Indian society through advertising

Nawabs, Noodles and Nudes by Ambi Parameswaran provides interesting insights around how Indian society has evolved over the past 50 years (and more so after Indian economy opened for liberalization in 90s). Advertising has used both social trends as well as attempted to change behavior when selling products and services.

Few examples of such changes include -
- Changing men- In 70s, the depiction was of macho man (refer Lifeboy ad) to a man who is using Fair Lovey to remain ‘fair’.
- Dynamics of husband-wife relationship from a suffering women to empowered women (refer Airtel ad where wife is the boss)
- Changing role of women from being a housewife to aspirational (refer, Santoor ad in 1986 showing woman at wedding while one in 1994 shows woman doing aerobics.)
- Ads depicting older people not showing the pain/suffering but of celebration and second innings (refer SBI Life ads) due to improved longevity

Its interesting also to see how some ads in India have brought in major changes like –
- Commodity mindset to brand mindset in wheat. Refer Captain Cook ads
- Making eggs food habit for Indians. Refer NECC ad

The book is organized into 4 broad sections, namely, people, product, services and ad narratives, each of which looks at changes in society from a different lens. The author also predicts the trends in next few years at end of each section and sub-section. The book is very interesting read for somebody who wants to understand what goes in an advertiser’s mind when creating an ad. For me, born before liberalization and seen a ‘controlled’ version of television and ads, this book provides interesting memorabilia of old ads as well.

Top 10 Indian E-Commerce Sites Traffic Comparison & More

Nice information with graphics - http://trak.in/tags/business/2014/06/04/top-10-indian-e-commerce-sites-comparison/

One of the graphic copied here for reference -

Measuring sports sponsorship (McK article)

With Football WorldCup rounds the corner, there is a nice article from McKinsey on how to measure Sports Sponsorship. Here are salient points -

• Articulate a clear sponsorship strategy—the overall objective of their portfolio, the target demographic, and which stages of the consumer decision journey (awareness, consideration, purchase, loyalty) sponsorships can support
• Find Cost per reach and optimize according to that. Favor exposure to the target demographic over total numbers.
• Increase Unaided awareness per reach - Besides acquiring sponsorship rights,its important to spend on activation—that is, marketing activities such as promotional booths and merchandise to promote the sponsorship.
• Measure Sales/margin per dollar spent - Track data on spending and reach (among a host of other media variables) over an extended period to establish links between sponsorships and sales, and then isolate the impact of sponsorships from other marketing and sales activities. 
• All sponsorship activities should enforce consistent brand image so that Long-term brand attributes are enhanced

Shopping 2.0: a small glimpse (part 1)

Here are some interesting (techie) things happening on shopping front -

1. Amazon Dash is a small hardware that helps capture any shippable item into a 'Dash' via scanning that product's bar code or saying the product name to the device, which can then be viewed as a list on Desktop or mobile device.
The beauty of this device is that you don't have to remember and keep recording your emptying groceries. Just use this device and capture it.





2. Hiku is a similar device as Amazon Dash just that while Amazon Dash ties itself to Amazon Fresh, Hiku has no such association to any marketplace yet.

3. Tesco's virtual store as the name suggests is a virtual store wherein large images of life-size store shelves filled with goods are pasted onto walls and doors. Each good has a small barcode which shoppers can use to take pictures and thus create a goods cart.

"You place an order when you go to work in the morning and can see the items delivered at home when you come home at night," said a spokeswoman for Homeplus.


Read part 2 for more techie updates.

Asia and Marketing template mentality

Prof. Dae Ryun Chang has been writing interesting things about marketing in Asian markets. In his blogs on HBR (Does Your Strategy Rely on a "Pan-Asian Identity"? , In Asia, Marketing 101 Doesn't Work), he talks about the fact that a common marketing template cannot be applied to entire Asian markets and marketers who are used to such a style of working should better adapt themselves. 


The author points out how the Asian markets are complex markets where not only each country has a distinct culture but even within the country (like India, China) there are multiple ethnical groups whose taste and preference don't match. Any company that plans to dominate the Asian markets would have to understand the nuances of these markets and then create multi-brand strategy targeted at individual regions, give a local flavor to the products and involve the local community.