The Mascot Conundrum
Brand Ambassadors’ come and they go. Stars today are not stars tomorrow. And hence brand ambassadors have to be constantly churned as and when they get popular or loose popularity. A film hit, or a controversy could make or break the case against a particular brand ambassador celebrity. So in this scenario comes in the Mascot. A mascot could be an image or animation in one or several avatars which could be used to provide a brand image continuity and an emotion connect with the target audience which continues for decades unlike the span of a Brand Ambassador which is likely to be for a couple of years instead of decades.
Hence with new age Media’s like the internet you could also go in for Mascots in various avatars and even Animated ones to appeal to the new uncompromising generation of youth. It would not only save you cost but with proper planning and implementation it could also cause a impact in the market which would result in a Brand Equity Enlargement which would be more than just incremental and would be rather phenomenal and humongous.
ATL and BTL Marketing
How Below the Line Marketing can create customer engagement in ways better than Mass marketing. You have the tangibility factor in Below the Line Marketing. Road Shows, events, et al can create an indelible 3d memory impression in your customer’s mind which is hard to remove even after years. Mass adverts can then have a new effect on your customers in consolidating the message you impart in the BTL activities.
The main factor is the experience the tangibility, the emotional connect through care and compassion of your employees. Make sure that your employees have the right fit with your organizational values and that there etiquettes demonstrate the same in front of the customers. Otherwise you could have an antithetical effect of BTL activities.
Also Mass Marketing could be made more interactive and fun, by SMS and win or some other interesting schemes, and make the whole affair more memorable and indelible. Samsung recently made an interactive advert for their Guru range of phones which makes an out of the box approach to advertising.
The Indian Women
I was recently reading a treatise in the Big Idea of 4p’s in which the writer speciously was trying to stereotype all women into one avatar. How foolish is it to expect a woman in Cosmopolitan city to be like a woman in a rural hinterland. Or women of middle class to be like that of women of upper class. Women with different background and culture are bound to behave differently.
Where women of city are freer and would not mind traveling or working in night shift, the same may not be true for a typical middle class woman of a conservative family.
Today women have broken all taboos and shackles and are seen in diverse roles hitherto unseen and inexperienced like those of Taxi drivers and Bar attendants.
A Rakhi Sawant, Mallika Sherawat no longer makes people raise an eyebrow, but some such type of women are seen doing social responsibility chorus and challenging government on various civic issues, using their sexuality as a weapon.
Sexuality by both males and females are also used as a ploy to get out of turn promotions in office.
Leaders and Society
Bullies of Leaders, and Peacemakers
What the leader means to the society. Mr. Manmohan Singh got justice to Sikhs killed in 80’s riots when he became the Prime Minister. Bhopal Gas tragedy still haunts India, as justice eludes the victims. If a PM from MP comes to center he will expedite that case. Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi still want to know the Mastermind behind their Killers.
On a personal note, when Sushil Kumar Shinde became the Chief Minister of Maharstra, some body on the same day came and wrote a poster and stuck on our door, “TERA BAAP BHIKARI HAI”. It meant that now our leader is in power, you “Bhaiyya’s beware”. When ever Raj Thackrey hits out at North Indians our divinely padosi’s start harassing us. After repeated complaints to NHRC, SHRC and Police Commissioners office, we have no reprieve, because the PM and President is not Himachali.
So friend, as Pratibha Patil became president, Maharastrian’s want Marathi to be the National Language.
So friends, leaders are the Community Leaders who do well for their community at the cost of other people who have no leaders to boast of at positions of influence. So this brings me to an important conclusion that should there be a equal representation of all communities in the Parliament and the Rajya Sabha, and should IAS officers not be posted in their own states to avoid bully behavior by people and their leaders.
HP’s Memristors
A chip consists of resistors, capacitors and Inductors now HP is adding a fourth dimension to the Chip a Memristor. It can hold intermediate values apart from 0’s and 1’s and is the basis for dense memory and Artificial Memory applications. Although its speed is very much less compared to existing DRAM’s ( 1/ 10th to be precise) but then it is very low on power requirements which acts as a big plus in its favor.
Also applicability is a great issue, that’s what I believe. If some body discovers, what is the sequence of operations and intermediate values required to complete an operation lot of time could be ultimately saved if the right intermediate values are stored and need not be recalculated. This makes the application very much suitable to AI and Expert system application. With training of the chip on the lines of biological brain functioning with training of problem solving synapses and cores on the chip it could lead to some break through achievements in Biological computing.
IBM and Intel are also working on Phase Change Memory which requires more power and works by changing the state of a glassy material from amorphous to crystalline and back. The switching speed of such memory is also low.