Good n Bad

To me the matters of good and bad seem like a sine curve when it comes to advertising. What's good is good, what's mediocre is mediocre and again, what's bad also seems good for people tend to get iconoclastic and relate to that bad piece of advertising, or sometimes these bad pieces of advertising appeal to the inner, concealed selves of human beings which we try to hide from the public eye.

Many people chastise Bingo for its unconnected ads, but then its a success story. To many people, it seems a bad piece of advertising, but if the primary motive of advertising is to boost sales, which I believe, one must admit Bingo is good! One real good, simplistic and wonderful ad to me seems to be the Reliance Classic Color Mobile with FM wala ad. The ad shows people grooving to the beats of latest chartbusters, and conveys the message damn well! That is one good thing to me...

Coming to bad things that click, when I asked people to write down some ads they liked and some they disliked, many of the girls said fairness cream ads were what they hated to the core, for they glorified fairness as beauty. But, to a marketer, these ads are runaway successes so much that it has made big companies roll out entirely new product lines catering to fairness creams for men segment.

Talking to bad advertising, one ad that I feel hasn't done justice to the product is Nokia 6300. Just the other day, a friend and I were discussing about the ad and while I felt the product exposure should have been in some other way, he felt that an ad is pointless when you are showing the product after 3 shots, and that too just a snapshot of it. There is absolutely no justification why they call it stylish. I have seen the phone, and I must say its a piece of art, but the ad doesn't tell me anything about it. This is definitely bad, according to me!

Again, Amul Macho ad has recieved lots of brickbats for its sheer eroticism, so much that the government has asked it to be put off the air. Many people dislike the ad for it seems B-Grade or even lower, but the sales figures speak otherwise. There are equal number of people who enjoy the ad as those who dislike it, as the article suggests. This suggests that though the ad is considered bad by a segment, if it has hit upon its target segment, it obviously is a hit. Again, by our assumption of a good ad being that which wins sales, this must be good.

So, when we judge ads, what is good and bad? What is a good piece of advertisement and what is a bad piece of it?! Should ethics be involved in advertising, or what should be the prerogative of advertising? As the Hutch Delhi Half Marathon punchline goes, Daudne ke liye bas dil chahiye! (You should just have a heart to run!), I say bechne ke liye bas dil chahiye! (same for sales!) So, I think we must all put aside our judgements about ads and just appreciate those ones that bring in the customers. After all, what is a good ad that doesn't win customers?!

Blogging for Branding...

Today, or infact tonight, seems to be the blog on brands night! :P In addition to the blog I posted hardly a couple of hours ago about Brand You, which is just below so am not linking it :P, I thought it would be better to put here a post I wrote in one other blog of mine which I decided not to carry forward for it provided me no good features I was looking for. Lets discuss that some other day, and stick to the post here:

Blogging to me, and many others I know, is a way to express yourself. But, what is it exactly that we get out of blogging? Is it satisfaction, happiness, security or acceptance? Probably it is a mixture of both, to me, it is the comfort of expressing yourself without any interruption.

Imagine talking about Gandhi. An illustrious figure that he is, I am sure when one is discussing Gandhi in a group, one cant speak for a continuous 5 minutes, which I assume a 1000 word blog post would take, for someone would chip in with appreciation or condemnation by then. Where as, if you are blogging about Gandhi, the canvas is all yours and your paint-kitty is full. You can write whatever you want, and then decide whether people speak and discuss about it or not. This is the biggest advantage of Blogging according to me.

Further, there are 100 things in each of us that are unknown to others. Mostly, people play it to the galleries when interacting with others. I mean we show that facet of ours that best suits the situation and the other person. It is never our complete self, which can be known and understood only when we want others to. This can be done either by expressing it through action or words. Expressing one self completely through actions would take loads of time. Imagine yourself wanting to prove it to others than you heart goes out for street children, and that is why you don't donate to child beggars at junction for you feel they are coerced into it by begging mafias. This could be interpreted in 100 ways, ranging from you being rude to indifferent to impassionate, based on the perciever. Where as, if you write it in a blog saying this is what i feel, teh writing is on the wall and everyone knows what you feel.

This is nothing but Marketing yourself, and that is what I think we blog for. We make ourselves heard, and invite people to know us better. That is the motive of Blogging for me!

This was my post there, and talking about blogs and brands, I guess I must link to Daniel Lyons who branded himself as Steve Jobs on his blog which he called The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Is this surrogate branding?

YOU

Mirror, Mirror, Mirror on the wall... What is the greatest brand of all?

YOU, your honor!

That is the eternal truth of the world. If one had to sum up the existence of man kind in one word, that would be branding. It is a naked truth that we all survive on branding, our own individual branding. We want to be associated as something or someone in other's minds. When it comes to perceptions, we seldom ask ourselves what we are, we generally ask what others think of us! We try to portray ourselves to others to make a statement. We brand ourselves. We brand ourselves as go-getters, arrogant, jubilant, insane or whatever! And who makes the megabucks in this frenzy? Its the brands, the real ones this time! Everybody who wants to be branded as a dynamic person like Amitabh, wants to flaunt Reid and Taylor. Everyone who wants to look cool flaunts a MotoRazr or MotoRockr. Of course, no if is if and no but is but until Hypothesis Testing has been done and the Null Hypothesis rejected. But then, the very fact that there is gut and gumption to propose the hypothesis means this holds some value.

If we ever thought Branding self is a radical, new concept, we are wrong. It dates back to decades and as much as I could dig out, there has been solid evidence exactly 10 years back when Fast Company magazine made a mention of Brand You in one of its 1997 editions. The magazine spoke of realising what you are, and planning your career envisaging yourself as a brand as far as in 1997.

In fact, everything we do is for branding. Blogging is a sort of branding exercise. We could blog about everything that happens in our lives. Irky neighbors, pesky teachers, gorgeous women we see, filthy roads we tread on and many many more. But we do not. We consciously choose what we blog on when we want to brand ourselves.

Why do we brand ourselves like this?

The basic crux of a product is as follows:



The true you that you are is the CORE, but it gets embroiled in how you present yourselves, and further gets a face-lift through what others perceive of you. Without even your conscious effort, you start branding yourself.

And then, why not brand?! It is important to let people know what you are, and in the world where customer is the king, you should truly play to the galleries. If an employer wants a certain kind of candidate, ofcourse you should brand yourself as an enterprising candidate for the same!

So, what is Brand You?! Look into yourselves and see what you as a real brand are, and market it well! Life is all about Marketing!

Get Liberal!

There are many states in the country which shower marks on the students. When these students venture out into other states and mention their marks, they are considered whizkids. But the fact is that their boards are either too leniant or give no scope for subjectivity in answers to test the students and hence end up in a situation where you need to award full scores to students.

Earlier, I thought this stigma lay only with the states but now it has even spread to the centre with students scoring nothing less than 99% there too. No issues with scoring high, but what is it that we are losing enroute?

I personally know loads of people who have shunned away Indian language courses and opted French Basic so that they could score high and end up in the higher bracket. Not that I had picked up the Indian course for the love of it, but just to cite a case. There are many universities in the country where disciplines like History, Mythology are shunned by students of Commerce, Arts, Mathematics and Sciences. This is not because they hate it, but it is because they are not scoring subjects. Everything in an institute is tied to the final score. Right from extracurricular indulgence to the course structure, students today value everything based on the score they could end up at in the end. Priyanka Sarkar makes an apt point about these high scores and low learning.

This is probably because parents want their kids to get into the rat race and earn high scores. Parents always ask kids what have they earned (as a score), but never what have they learned. Indus Valley Civilisation is a whole discipline in itself and has many lessons embedded into it, and its shameful today that we haven't mastered it. All we know of Indus Valley is the one chapter we had in our History books in High School. Of course, I omit students pursuing History!

This sorry state is probably because we percieve every discipline as independent. We must realise that perhaps Science and art may be independent, but History, Philosophy, Literature, Mythology and Politics are all intertwined with every course and discipline. These are not subjects. They are hallmarks of the transitions of our society, and one look at the literature of a century tells us all the sciences, commerce, arts and mathematics of that century.

The branch that encompasses these all-transcending disciplines of History, Philosophy, Literature etc... constitute what we call Liberal Arts. Speaking from a Management perspective, I dont think we can develop globally competent Managers without the knowledge of Liberal Arts equipped in our wards.

I pity myself when I reminisce those golden days of high school where I would savor literature of Wordsworth, Eliott, John Keats and likes, though to a limited extent. Then, I never knew the beauty and necessity of literature. Today when I know I dont have any such chance to read them. Of course, as personal indulgence, I do follow them but what I speak of global application.

A true Manager should have a true sense and understanding of History, as a professor of mine puts it. I fervently believe Literature is something that teaches you a lot, Management and otherwise. Philosophy is something we could never debate upon. For a country like ours, every spirited citizen should believe that we need to know Political Sciences. If not to get into them, it would at least help us measure the country's governance with appropriate yardsticks. One reason why the governance of the country is below expectation in most of the regions is because though the inhabitants there are well educated, they are illiterates in Political Sciences. To them, Political Sciences mean Parties and the mud-slinging they indulge in. Before you go searching for an example, check out Bangalore, the best example!

All said and done, it is very clear that we need not toppers, but learners. Learned individuals who have deep sense of history, understand culture and art, absorb philosophies of the land and think not in terms of theorems and theories but society and progress. We produce people who can mint money who have no idea of anything except their own area of work. Suppose tomorrow, a holocaust puts an end to IT Services Industry, we are going to dogs as a nation.

It is high time we realised what we are lacking and mend our mistakes sooner than later. Very soon, there shall be day when our kids will no longer know about great saints of this country, for they dont teach Thiruvalluvar, Thikkana and likes in those scoring courses, and score is what we want!

Is this an answer?

Paradox

In the world of Management, as the course Fundamentals of Management Systems states, there exist paradoxes and these rule the world of Management. Change requires stability states one and enterprise is the individual signifies the other. All we need to tackle them all is Flexibility, says our professor who is obsessed with the F-word, of course F meaning Flexibility ;)

An MBA in Management Systems is all about connecting the learnings in the class to the world outside, the environment you are a part of, the world you see, the people you associate with. For once, I couldn't agree less for I feel our life is nothing but paradox. We are all living a life of paradoxes.

India shining, Inflation rising. Tourist sector booming, foreigners raped and killed. Peace with neighbors, Samjhauta Express is burnt. Not to offend anybody or any thing involved, but to shed light on the conditions we dwell in, and the environment we call life.

Paradox in life starts from everything. You go to class and sit, more interested in attendance than the teaching. You play the sports fest of the college, only to hoot and sledge than relish the real sporting spirit. You sweat a lot to do something meaningful out of your learning in a semester, and all you get in return is some lousy, crude humor from immature dudes who call themselves your friends. This could, in a part, be attributed to jealousy and immaturity. But what about cases where we hear of small kids being harassed? Society has been abound from domestic violence on kids to petty harassments to dreadful cases like the one in Nithari. Do we call this prosperity? Isn't all this a mega paradox that we call society?

You lose respect for courses, classes, sports, friends all because of the scum that is prevalent in the world in every thing that is present and dwelling. Should we let this scum have an adverse effect on us? Letting such small portion of people, things or events have an adverse impact on us... Isn't this paradoxical? What is straight in this world? We live in false hopes and dreams all through. Sometimes we promise people we got over something, we shall sure forget something but we know the bloody hell that we wouldn't forget it for anything in the world. It could be anything, a missed opportunity, a failed exam, a poor interview or a lost match. Half of what we say is different from what we mean.

Where is Utopia? To me, the biggest paradox seems to be Utopia. The funniest thing about Utopia is that when you ask somebody what Utopia to them is, and comes the reply... Utopia, to me, is a place where there is no this, no that, blah blah... Everybody wants to disassociate things, and thinks of only bad things when asked of the sanest place in the world. Why, in the first place, do we live then?! If that is the case, isn't life a paradox?

I know you don't know the answer, and still I pose the question. This, my friend, is the ultimate paradox.

Sell Ethics

An age old debate... An age old myth, and the legend gets dynamic by the day. How, what, where and why of Sales have changed over the ears... Sales is an amazing process. If one has the conviction, it seems like the best job to do!

Its amazing to sell people things they want, I believe. However, due to competition and challenging targets revised and revisited everyday, people tend to bluff about their own self and ruin the reputation of sales like never before. This is the pitiable state of sales.

People hate sales personnel, and students think learning sales is all about learning to lie. I loathe it when people say to sell means to lie. Do you have to lie when you have to sell something? Just cos u highlight the positives and try to conceal the negatives, does that mean u r unethical? Or even the basic question one should ask perhaps, is being unethical inadvertent?! Why should a sales guy have to lie?

Or is it that a sales guy doesn't lie, but people think such! Imagine a situation of Mahatma Gandhi. With all great reverence to the man, I feel he is a bald, lean, poor man who has not enough clothe to drape himself! Then, we have a nation of a billion and counting, praying him, idolising him and naming their kids after him. Why? I ask them, and they say he is a great man... Are they lying? Are they being unethical? On retrospection, I realise I was wrong, for every coin has two sides.

Life is all about looking at the silver lining overlooking the darkest of the clouds. If someone can see the positives, realise their importance and communicate it to someone effectively and deliver them something, of course also having some defects unsolicited sometimes, is that unethical? The above statement, according to me is the gist of sales. Does it sound unethical? Is having conviction in something and delivering it unethical?

People say the ability for sales is to lie, and I beg to differ. Is it that? No... Anybody can who can call a spade a spade will realise when a person is lying. Sales is not about lying, it is about passion... Having passion for the product you sell, towards the commitment to the customer you sell it to and the passion for your job!

To conclude, this is what I feel as a student, so one wud have to wait and see wht i wud feel once am in the quagmire :P
As King Naresh says... All's well in hell! :D