Be Practical on Pricing

Pricing is a crucial component of the marketing mix. How to price a new product or how much to increase the price of an existing product are decisions that marketers have to make all the time. In many cases, they turn to marketing research to shed light. There are a wide variety of pricing models […]

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Promoting on the Internet

If I were to ask you about your top 5 favourite TVCs, I bet you won’t have too much difficulty rattling them off. However, if I were to ask you of your top 5 brand campaigns on the internet, I am quite certain that most of you would scratch your heads. Unfortunately, most marketers in […]

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Fail Better!

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Samuel Beckett. Some of the greatest people in business (and otherwise) should have been abject failures. In fact, at some point in the beginning of their careers, they WERE failures. Let’s look at some of these people: “We don’t like their sound, and […]

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50 Ways to Differentiate Your Brand

The greatest challenge that people in marketing and advertising face is to differentiate their brand vis-à-vis competition. Most product categories are getting inundated with brands – the result is that many of the categories are getting commoditised with very little difference between brands. I will try and cover differentiation in detail in the near future. […]

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The Top Business Buzzwords

The Global Language Monitor has announced the Top Business Buzzwords that are used in English globally. The top word is ‘content,’ which topped the list for the second consecutive year. Guru, a Sanskrit-origin term which means teacher or master, has moved down to 15th position in 2014 from 6th slot a year ago. According to […]

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31 Brands That Are Now Used Generically

There are many products that we use without realising that they were either brand names once or still are. I remember that most Indian housewives used Dalda as a surrogate for all hydrogenated vegetable oils. I am sure that many of you would be amazed if I were to tell you that Zipper and Escalator […]

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The Rules of Branding

I have a lot of respect for Al Ries and Jack Trout. They are the two marketing and branding strategists who, over the years, have propounded extremely simple ideas and advice on marketing, branding and advertising. They did not write research-backed tomes but, on reading any of their books, one knew that they were talking […]

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Do Public Service Ads Work?

I have found that ad agencies tend to come out with quite outstanding public service (or social issue) ads. This is obviously because public service ads allow greater freedom for creativity; there are no ‘boundaries’ inhibiting the creative process. I mean, when you are creating ads for brands and services that have a commercial motive, […]

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Are You a Radical Marketer?

There are brands that manage to build a fanatical following.  Think Harley Davidson. Think Harvard Business School. Think Virgin Atlantic Airways. Or think Apple. We all admire these brands for the passionate response that they generate from their users. I am sure all of us would want to elicit a similar response from the consumers […]

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The Social Tipping Point

There are three path breaking technical innovations that are happening today: The rise of mobile broadband Smartphones with powerful cameras Explosion of social media As a result of these innovations, people are creating and sharing images and words like never before. Two thirds of the content in the ‘digital universe’ is created by consumers, not […]

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