Random House Publications online

I came across an article in The Economic Times today (Yes, they sometimes have good stuff too) and followed the link about the author. It led me to a surprise source of stories and articles on the web... a mix of fiction, history and opinions.

The reader in me was happy, and the Gujju in me was even happier. Because all of it is free :)

Follow this link (http://randomhouseindia.wordpress.com) to look 'Random Reads', a blog containing articles by authors associated with Random House Publications in India.

Have fun reading.

Distance versus Time

Q: "How far is this place from here?"
A: "It will take you about 40 minutes to reach there."

Q: "How far is this place from here?"
A: "About 12 kilometres."

Same question. Two different answers. And not just that, the answers use two different measures altogether. One tells us the distance. Other tells us the time it will take to travel.

They surprised me the first time. But the more I think about them, the more information they reveal. The first answer is something I get in Mumbai. The second is what I got in Kolkata and in Udaipur, a small town in Rajasthan.

My interpretation goes thus. In Mumbai, more people use public transport as compared to those in Udaipur or Kolkata. So they wouldn't care much or even know about the exact distances between two places. All they care is the time taken. As compared to Mumbai, since more people in Udaipur and Kolkata would ride/drive themselves, they have a good idea of the distance and hence, that measure provides a clear answer.

Another possibility is that, with traffic jams all day round and one or the other road under repair or construction, time becomes more critical as compared to the actual distance, in a fast paced city like Mumbai. For example, my office is only 8 kilometres away, but it takes anywhere between 25 and 45 minutes for me to travel. In this sense, if someone asked me, "how far is your office?", an answer of "8 kilometres" indicates nothing.

On a personal basis, it also might give some info about the answerer's priorities. If he does answer with time as a measure in stead of distance, it just shows he is pressed for it. How would you answer this question?

A cuppa a day...

This is an inspiration from MathAtheist's post here and a post from Rashmi's blog (Couldn't locate the post, though).

On a recent trip, I realised that I drink lotsa cups of tea and coffee when in office. My brother V was accompanying me and he pointed out that I have got addicted to it.

Maybe he's right, maybe he's not. The only way to find out was to check what happens if I stop drinking everytime I want to.

It's been 3 days, and it's been nice. The target was 'a cuppa a day'. Down from 4 cups a day. AndI have come quite close to it already. I have had only 4 cups of tea in the past 3 days... and no coffee!

And yes, it does prove, I am not addicted. Water quite effectively substituted tea / coffee whenever I felt the thirst, and not drinking tea/coffee felt great too.


"How long will you continue this?" you may ask.


In reply, I quote a dialogue from The Matrix Revolutions [2003]:
The Architect: "Just how long do you think this peace will last?"
The Orcale: "As long as it can."

:)

Outliers: An outstanding take on 'Luck'

"I make my own destiny."

This is what my T-shirt says today. But the book in my hand respectfully disagrees.

'Outliers' by Malcolm Gladwell presents a very compelling case on why successful people are not just brilliant and hard-working, but also 'lucky' to be in the right place at the right time. In fact, as the first few chapters in the books explain, some successful people are 'lucky' even for the month and year of their birth!

Outliers explores both width and depth of 'luck' playing a role in the success stories of people. The first section explains the amazingly wide set of circumstances that, as Paulo Coelho would have said, conspire to make a person fulfill his/her dreams. And the second section goes deep in the history of successful people... in many cases, up to a few generations back in time. And both sections present the same conclusion. Success is as much a matter of chance, as it is a matter of genius.

Talk of equal opportunities for everyone!

This might depressing and dis-empowering, but the book's message is exactly the opposite. And this is where the book itself becomes an outlier among books on success. Gladwell goes on to say that the conclusions simply mean we can 'create' more successes by simply adding the 'luck' factor. In many cases, it can mean doing as simple things as tweaking the circumstances a bit. Like a small change in the rules of how Canadian hockey players are selected for professional leagues can give us double the size of outstanding players, even if the pool of eligible players remains of the same size.

If what the book suggests is true, the impact of making such small changes around us would be so big, that it would be beyond measurement.

At a very personal level, I found the book very inspiring. I finished the book with this thought:
"At the same time when I am carving out a living for myself, I am willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, creating circumstances for others being successful (or failures). I contribute to the 'luck' factor that their genius requires."

And that sounds like true power!

B for Brands - October 2008

Below is the second article in the same magazine, The Observer of Management Education. It was published in the October 2008 issue.

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Imagine living in a world where a toothpaste is only a toothpaste, a soap is only a soap, and a cola is just a cola. No, no, it's not a world of monopoly. There would obviously be many suppliers, and many more vendors. But there is no way to identify one supplier from another, and one vendor from another. All shopkeepers stock the same product, with the exact same packaging, with the exact same price.

Sounds horrific, doesn't it? How does a buyer know whether the product he is buying is even worth the price that he is paying for it? If he found a defect with the product, how does he find out whom to punish? Even from a supplier's point of view, it doesn't sound great. If I were a manufacturer of toothpaste, there is no benefit for me to make a better quality toothpaste. I don't even get recognition for making that superior product.

This is the world without brands. A world where there is no brand name, no familiar symbol, no reputed company to place your trust on. In this world, being in the same business for the past 100 years doesn't mean a thing. Being at the cutting edge of technological development doesn't carry any benefits. And being the official supplier to the royal family, too, means nothing. As we said earlier, a world where a product is just a product... a world without brands.

What is a brand, then?
A brand is anything that helps create an identity and maintain a reputation. Even a shopkeeper's name is a brand, if it helps create a reputation. Even a region's stamp creates a reputation. Why have we been going to the same provisional store for the past 20 years, when there is another store next to that outlet itself? Why do we savour teas from Assam and Darjeeling? Have we noticed that we go to the same general physician every time we catch a cold, or notice something inconsistent with our body? This, in spite of the fact that he is just a general physician, like many others in the town.

Why does this happen? Of course, these places make a good-quality product, available at a value-for-money price. But in addition to this, they have a reputation of being consistently good. And they have established an identity unique from most other products. In other words, they are a brand.

In fact, the origin of branding is connecting to the practice of establishing a unique identity. It comes from the Swedish word for “fire”. In those times, farmers would put a mark on their cattle so as to identify them from the big herd when they go to the fields or for grazing. A piece of iron would be burned, and when it is red-hot, the mark would be stamped on the animals, so as to indicate ownership of that animal. Hence, even today brands are as closely associated with symbols as with names.

So what all does a brand include?
As you must have guessed, a brand is anything and everything that helps a manufacturer build a unique identity, intended at building a unique reputation. The ultimate objective is to exploit this reputation for growing the business and earn extraordinary profits.

In addition to a name, companies try to build uniqueness by having a symbol, shape, packaging, colour and maybe even a special sound to its identity. The 'M' of McDonald's restaurants, called the Golden Arches, is unique to the chain. The tick mark on all Nike products, called the 'Swoosh' is again unique to it. The clear, plain white that makes the Apple PCs and laptops stand out from the other PCs and laptops covered in the typical black, the four-dings-music of 'Intel Inside', the purple colour on the packaging of all Cadbury's chocolates, the rectangular box for National Geographic magazine and channel, and the '100% protection' sword for Dettol products are all efforts to build their brands.

Some of these efforts have interesting stories behind them. The first global computer company, IBM (International Business Machines) had a huge sales force and customer support team. All these men would be on the field most of the time, wearing their blue suits, and meeting business managers and IT officers. This army of blue-suit-clad men gave the company its name – Big Blue. Today, even though most IT and tech companies have blue as part of their logo, and undertake lots of activities to make themselves popular, it is still IBM that is associated with this colour.

So then why is branding criticised?
For both consumers and companies, branding comes at a price, and quite a big one at that. Branding exercises at very expensive, and they require long-term commitments of both time and money. For example, after Pepsi and Coca Cola entered the Indian market in the early 1990s, it took them more than a decade to become profitable. This, in spite of the fact that a bottle of cola costs almost nothing to manufacture, and being frequently consumed, brings in large revenues due to high sales volume. The long time taken to become profitable was because the investments that both companies made in distribution and advertising were huge.

The way branding affects consumers is that we end up paying quite a premium on the price because it is a brand that we buy, not a product. Even if you have no clue about marketing and branding, chances are that you would have come across this story, if you have been following this discipline for some time now:

A professor starts talking to a class full of students of marketing. He says, “Imagine meeting a craftsman. He takes a sheet of canvas and a piece of rubber, and cuts out two identical shapes from the canvas and similarly two identical shapes from the rubber. Then, he stitches the canvas and rubber pieces together. In this way, he creates a pair of shoes. If he comes and sells this pair to you, how much would you pay him?”
“Nothing, those shoes won't last at all.”
“Maybe only Rs. 200. Those shoes aren't worth more than that.”
“Rs. 300, provided the rubber and canvas are of very good quality.”
The professor continues, “Suppose I buy the shoes from him, cut four more pieces from the canvas and create the shapes of N, I, K and E from those pieces and stitch them to the shoes. If I come and sell them to you now, how much would you pay for these shoes?”
The class fell silent. No one answered for a long time. “This is the power of brands,” the professor declared. “The same shoes are suddenly worth much more, with a name like Nike, adidas or Reebok stitched on them. Suddenly, we don't mind paying as much as Rs. 2500 for the same pair of shoes.”

Of course, the example given here is very simple and presents a very defeatist view of branding. Just a little more thought into the example here, and we strike back asking, 'Hey, Nike's shoes are not just a piece of canvas and rubber stitched together.' Quite true. In fact, some time ago, Nike launched a shoe called Air Dri-Goat or ADG, claiming that this shoe's design is inspired by the foot of a wild mountain goat. This goat goes through rough terrain all the time and still 'we don't see it banging into a tree'. Similarly, Mercedes recently displayed a concept car that was inspired by a fish, and it is claimed that the car's aerodynamic design reduces resistance to air and increases performance phenomenally. The price that we pay is not for just a shoe or a car, but also for these seemingly trivial, but very beneficial features too.

So is a price premium the only way to earn back the investments?
Not really. Price premium is not the only benefit of building brands. Like any other asset, brands carry a resale value too. One of the most famous cases of a brand being sold is when the Pillsbury Co. was acquired by Grand Metropolitan PLC in 1989. GrandMet paid about $1125 million for acquiring the company, of which 88% ($990 million) was for acquiring the ‘goodwill’ of the Pillsbury name and other branded properties of the Pillsbury Company. The valuation of the Pillsbury brand was done by a London-based brand consultancy firm ‘InterBrand’, which has now become the global authority on valuation of brands.

In addition to price premium and resale value, there are many more benefits that make business sense for investing in brand building.

Since the name is already trustworthy, more products can be launched under the same name, and can become instant hits in the market. This practice is called brand extension. It is the power of brand Apple that made the iPod and the iPhone sell at the pace at which they did. Google, which built its brand on the back of super-efficient search algorithms, also changed the scenario of email, by bringing in its GMail services. It plans to repeat the success in the markets on Internet browsing (with Google Chrome) and mobile operating system (with Android). It was the power of brand Reliance that gives massive free publicity to all new ventures of the Ambanis.

Another way how brands build business is distribution. Across the world, the war of colas is fought not only on television but also at the outlets. Both Pepsi and Coca Cola strive to get exclusive distribution rights to their basket of brands, in super markets, cafeterias, restaurants, etc. At one point, 40% of Procter and Gamble’s sales would come via distribution behemoth, Wal-Mart. Not a small feat, considering P&G is one of the world’s biggest marketers of fast-moving consumer goods.

If all this is true, how come we still have unbranded stuff?
Sounds too logical, doesn’t it? If there are so many benefits of branding, how come some people still want to sell unbranded stuff? There are two answers to this. One is that as more and more products gets branded, branding of newer products becomes increasingly expensive. For example, when there are umpteen different brands of body soap available, it becomes very tough for a new brand to create any impact on our minds. The second answer is that, not all products benefit from the power of brands. Do we remember or care what brand of toothpicks, nail clippers, or handkerchiefs do we buy and use?

Never thought about it, did we?

A For Advertising - September 2008

Sometime last year, I started contributing an article for a magazine, The Observer of Management Education. The below article was published in the September 2008 issue.

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Picture this. A kid wakes up early morning from his bed and gets out of his home. At the same time, his pet dog also wakes and starts following him. During the day, the kid is seen playing football, playing near a stream, and generally having a good time. And throughout this time, the faithful pet dog continues to be at his side, and follows him wherever he wanders. At night, the kid goes back to his home, and is seen sleeping peacefully on his bed. Guess what, the dog is still next to him, sleeping. A nice song plays in the background. At the end, we see the words – wherever you go, our network follows.

Chances are that you would want to watch this film again and again, and that you also talked about this film to your friends. Chances also are that you remember the name of the company1. Maybe you even went out to the shop and bought the services of this company.

The company is, of course, Hutch. And we are talking about its now famous pug advertising campaign. Isn’t it a little weird that this company chose to show a cute boy and an equally adorable pug in its ads, instead of talking about what services it offers, or what is the price range, or where it is available in the market?

It is not, when we understand what advertising is and how it works.

What is advertising?

Put in simple terms, advertising is how a company talks to consumers at large, about its products and services that it offers. Because it talks to a huge number of people together, it has to do this through a mediator like a TV channel, or a magazine, and it pays the mediator for that service.

If we were to define in a more evolved manner aka management, advertising would be defined as a paid form of mass, non-personal communication. This definition also helps separate advertising as a form of communication different from unpaid publicity (Public Relations), Direct marketing, and Sales Promotion.

In a normal 2-year full-time management course, advertising as a practice of marketing is covered as a short topic in the second semester, and as a separate subject in the third semester for students specialising in marketing.

How do other communication tools stand against advertising?

As mentioned earlier, Public Relations is a form of communication using unpaid publicity. Direct Marketing involves one-on-one personal communication with the consumers, and Sales Promotion is mainly to do with schemes and discounts with the sole objective of increasing sales.

However, over the years, all forms of communication have started overlapping with each other so much, that now, during decision making, companies club all these forms and refer to them as Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC).

The role of advertising

Since advertising is how the company talks to its customers, the company depends on it to pass on any meaningful information about the company’s products, services, offers, policies and practices to them. Thus, if it does a good job, customers get the message and use this information to decide whether they want to buy the company’s products or not.

However, with technology increasingly becoming available to everyone, and products becoming less and less unique, companies look up to communications (and thus advertising too) to play a more critical role for their businesses. Since advertising is by far the biggest medium of interaction between the company and everybody else, from that point of view, the company’s advertising also becomes the face of the company. This, then, requires a lot more rigour in the way it is practiced.

If we look at the way different telecom companies advertise, we can make our own judgments about not just their services, but also their point of view on the business itself. Hutch (now Vodafone) depicts the simplicity of using its services by showing a pug helping its master find socks, stick stamps, etc. Idea, on the other hand, shows how mobile phones come in handy in different situations, like communicating with deaf people, and even teaching children in far away villages. Airtel, with its ‘Express Yourself’ series of TV ads, just encourages people to speak up and talk to each other. All these companies make an attempt in their own way connect with their customers emotionally. At the same time, they do make sure they stay within the boundaries of their businesses so that it doesn’t sound superficial or fake.

Different media used in advertising

As we discussed earlier, at the end of the day, ads still play (or are expected to play) a critical role in generating sales. Hence, ads follow consumers wherever they are, and tell them about the companies’ products and services. Thus, there is advertising on TV, in magazines, on hoardings at the side of roads, on the back of bus tickets, on the radio, and thanks to Google, even next to our messages in our email inbox.

These various media are referred to as:

1)Television

2)Print or Press, which includes newspapers, magazines, journals, etc.

3)Radio

4)Out of home, which includes hoardings on the road, bus stops, railway platforms, TV screens in multiplexes, etc.

5)Digital, which refers to the Internet

Based on how we evolve in our use of media, these categories continue to branch out from the root. With the increase in mobile phones penetration, that medium might become a separate branch in itself, requiring special attention.

The world of advertising inside out

The ads that we see on TV or in a magazine, and the melodious, or sometimes jarring jingles that we hear on radio are a result of a lot of work that goes behind the screens. A variety of people with different skills and ideas come together to create a work of art called an ad, that’s also supposed to sell. Just like the practice of management, this one too is always involved in a debate of science versus art. Because of this, advertising as a profession attracts both the most creative and the most scientific of brains.

In a typical ad agency, work is divided into several departments. There is Account Management, which acts as a liaison between the agency and the client. They act as the client’s representative within the agency, bringing all business knowledge to the table. Then there is Account Planning, which acts as the customer’s representative, studying the target audience’s behaviour, habits, culture, customs and traditions, attitudes, etc.

When any work for creating an ad starts, the Account Management and Account Planning teams use their knowledge bank to put a communication strategy in place. This is then fed to another department, the Creative team. As their name suggests, these are the people who take a leap from the obvious, into the unknown, and come back with ideas that would create magic on the small screens of TV and computers or in the newspaper. The ideas are then used by the Production department to create ads for various media like TV and print and radio.

Interesting Photographs

Here are some interesting photographs I have clicked over the last few months.

- While most instruction boards tell us something that we would normally want to do, this one tells us something that we wouldn't even want to do. Maybe it's for the kids!

- Now wouldn't this count as only 'lip' service to use of correct language?

- This is one soon-to-open cafe in the area where I stay. While the baseline is lifted from KFC ads, it has a really great connect with the name too. 'Chaat' is Hindi means both 'savoury / tangy snacks', and 'lick'.

- I had heard of Carlsberg the beer brand, but this was different. On Mumbai's airport, I found this outlet selling apparel - the lesser-known Karlsburg.

- Now this kinda English does give me ACDT!!! :-)