Pichku!

This is from the bakery near my office where I frequent sometimes for a bite. I went there for tea today and I see that Maggie has packaged their rich tomato sauce in a new manner - in a plastic squeeze pouch with a toothpaste tube like thing on top through which you can squirt it out. The thing has a photo of Javed Jaffery on its cover, with a manic grin on his face and holding on to a huge tube of sauce, squirting it out merrily. The product is apparently called "Pichku" - have you seen it?

There's this story by Saki in which a particularly tasteless breakfast supplement is given the absurd name "Filiboid Studge" and a wonderful marketing campaign started around it till it quite becomes the rage, and the owner makes a killing. Because it is so tasteless, housewives take particular demented pleasure in pressing it upon their husbands in the morning. If they would lose their appetite at the sight of that, in the evening they would be served a warmed up mess with the words "Your filiboid studge that you did not eat this morning." Ads were created where sinners were shown roasting in hell, with the ominous line:"THEY cannot have their filiboid studge anymore". You ought to read it.

Talking of advertising, another book to read is Dorothy Sayer's "Death must advertise" - it IS a crime thriller but since Peter Wimsey has to masquerade as an advertising professional in it the book has its moments.

Anyway I am getting beside the point. To think up a name like "Pichku" for a sauce squeeze tube is something ... the implications are legion.

It can be used as a readymade graffiti tool.

It can have a ready market in bloody films - anyway they use ketchup for bloody scenes, this is such a convenient way of achieving the bloody effect with not a drop of ketchup wasted - I am not sure applying it out of bottles is as economic.

The name would also appeal to kids who have a penchant for making a mess of sofas and car seats and walls - something like an amateur effort at graffiti.

Nestle is quite a reputed company - to convince them to name a product Pichku must have taken some doing.

Wonder how long the board of directors laughed when the name was first uttered and when they started taking it seriously and came round to the view that it could be a name for this product.

Or was there a pin drop silence of which an advantage was taken to hasten the decision?
Was it referred to the Swiss parent company, or was the decision taken about the name at the regional level?

- Contributed by Atrijit Dasgupta, Bangalore

Interactive Marketing - who is the customer?

Marketers are accustomed to taking a generational look at their customers in order to find out the most fitting media mix, creative treatment, and call-to-action. This analysis matters even more for those who are in interactive marketing. Young consumers (Gen Yers and millennials) interact with digital media in a fundamentally different way than their older siblings, parents, and grandparents. Here is a closer look at Interactive Marketing:

· Gen Y is redefining the future of interactive marketing. Gen Yers internalize technology like no other generation -- giving more credence to investments in interactive channels. Compared with other adults, they're more than twice as likely to be Creators of original content (31% versus 14%) and Joiners of social networks (54% versus 22%). Like all adults, they regularly use portals for email and search but are more likely to tap other portal resources, like calendars (18% versus 11%) and video search (18% versus 7%). There are reports available on these from Forrester - The State Of Consumers And Technology: Benchmark 2008 and Benchmark 2008: Gen Y Comes Of Age -- both must reads for any interactive marketers who needs quantitative insights to plan campaigns and grow the overall digital budget.

· Teens multitask more than ever. Anyone with a 16-year-old knows that, at this age, relationships eclipse almost everything. So it should come as no surprise that young consumers, ages 12 to 17, engage in all sorts of social activities while engaging with traditional media channels. Did you know that younger teens multitask more with video games while older teens are more likely to multitask while listening to music and interacting with their peers? Both groups have a tendency to multitask while doing homework (sorry teachers!).

· Social media requires new rules of engagement. Since young consumers -- with their different expectations -- love social media, marketers must become fluent in the language of these tools. In the case of blogs, marketers must answer the questions, "Will we allow posts that criticize our products?" and "Do we want our customers talking about our competitors on our blog?" With desktop and Web widgets -- much more popular with youth than adults -- the question is: "How can we leverage widgets for marketing purposes?"


For Those Of You With Other Customer Segments
Not all of you market to millennials or Gen Yers -- exclusively or even primarily. There are marketing tactics that appeal to other generations. For example, mobile email has specific appeal to Gen X (the average age of consumers who use mobile email at least monthly is 37). Marketers can ready their email programs by asking subscribers about their mobile preferences and understanding how email renders on mobile devices.

The Mind of the Strategist by Kenichi Ohmae

To begin with, in the book “The Mind of the Strategist”, Kenichi Ohmae emphasizes that it is a particular state of mind that helps in building successful business strategies. The good news is that this state of mind can be acquired and practised to reach its full potential!

Kenichi Ohmae has divided the book in 3 major parts. In first part, which he calls the “Starting Point” or “The Art of Strategic Thinking” he talks about Analysing the problem or the issue, as faced by an organization, into their constituent parts to clearly understand the particular character of each element. This will help us in understanding the “Four Routes to Strategic Advantage” –
1. Key Success Factor in the Business
2. Building on Relative Superiority
3. Pursuing Aggressive Initiatives
4. Exploiting Strategic Degree of Freedom

In the second part, called “Building Successful Strategies” Ohmae writes about the “Strategic Triangle” or the three major constituents of any business strategy. These are:
1. the corporation itself,
2. the customer
3. the competition.

In terms of these three key players, strategy is defined as the way in which a corporation endeavors to differentiate itself positively from its competitors, using its relative corporate strengths to better satisfy customer needs.
The Part three of the book called “Modern Strategic Realities” deals with Environmental influences and how to cope with strategic changes of the present days. Ohmae writes about four strategic changes visible at present:
1. From labor to capital intensity
2. From multinationals to multi-locals
3. Shift from fixed-cost to variable-cost game:
4. Foresighted decision-making

Ohmae also talks about a Five-step process to achieve these strategic changes:
1. The business domain must be clearly defined.
2. Extrapolate the present forces into the future on the basis of cause and effect with a logical hypothesis as to the most likely scenario.
3. Only a few of the many strategic options must be chosen and once the choice is made, people, technology, and money must be deployed very boldly and aggressively towards them.
4. The company must pace its strategy according to its resources.
5. Management must be ready to change the basic direction of the business if changed conditions demand so.

Ohmae believes that it is the combination of analytical method and mental elasticity, which makes strategic thinking extremely relevant to the problem of strategic stagnation in any organization.

The only aspect which I found missing in the book is the Strategic Alliances with suppliers and other business organizations, the two most important strategic decisions for an organization doing business at present.

The best thing about this book is that though it was written way back in 1982, most of the concepts talked about here are extremely relevant even today. Some of these concepts are competitor-based strategies, key success factor, functional strategies, relative superiority, position relative, critical issue, competitive advantage, aggressive initiatives, tunnel vision, flexible thinking, strategic triangle, planning units, back corporation, economic environment, strategic response, strategic change, etc which are considered key elements of modern market strategy. Therefore, it can be said without any doubt that this book is more relevant today than may be when it was published!