Remembering C.K. Prahalad

Entrepreneurship:
“Entrepreneurs should not let limited resources constrain their ambitions or let deeply ingrained biases blind them to revolutionary change”

Core competence:
“Companies must identify and focus on their competitive strengths”

“How many senior executives discuss the crucial distinction between competitive strategy at the level of a business and competitive strategy at the level of an entire company?”

The Future of Competition:
“’Company-centric’ approach to product innovation is giving way to a world in which companies ‘co-create’ products with consumers.”

Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid:
“Entrepreneurial ingenuity… amid such poverty, where success depends on squeezing the most out of minimal resources to furnish quality products at rock-bottom prices, has cosmic implications for executives and consumers everywhere. Some of the most interesting companies of the future won’t emerge from Silicon Valley or other places of abundant means, they will come from places many executives don’t even think about because they have been considered too marginal. They won’t have that excuse for much longer, though.”

Dominant Logic:
“It’s quite an art to get a board filled with past and current CEOs to think of the world in a different way.” “…to shake free of their dominant logic.”

Outsourcing:
“Many companies don’t understand yet that outsourcing isn’t about exporting jobs. It’s about importing innovation.”

The New Age of Innovation:
“The economic crisis is an opportunity for organizations to re-engineer their businesses and create new models of delivering products & services to their customers”

Next practice, not best practice:
“It’s not about adopting best practices; it’s about finding next practices to leapfrog from being behind to adopting next generation tools.”

Creative Destruction – Death by over analysis

What happens when you take a perfectly respectable creative and put it through the marketing manager’s microscope…for people who know what I do, my saying this would come as a surprise to them as I am a marketing person myself …which is exactly why I cant help but cringe at the creative destruction that takes place once we receive a concept for an ad!

A typical marketing campaign or ad goes through various levels of approvals, gathering comments of various people ranging from the actual bosses to employees who might have been passing the marketing desk on their way to the coffee machine!, They are people who feel the need to let us know their valuable comments on each and every element of the creative going into details of what they think that smile on the face of the model means to them at an existential level… and in the process totally missing the point by miles!

So here we go back to the drawing boards…and all because Mr. So & So from Whatever department had difficulty ‘decoding’ (a fancy ad term most often used by brand managers and client servicing guys) this piece of art, we have to now go about making it as ‘fool’ proof as possible! (Yes, we admit and live with the fact that we are fools)

Now begins what I fondly call, creative destruction…no this is not as simple as the murder of pure thought, or the repression of misunderstood art. This is the slow and painful process of creatively killing by justifications, which receive an ear only by virtue of the speaker possessing the title of a ‘client’! Each element of the unfortunate ad is analyzed and over analyzed. Everything from the creative thought to the position of the 3rd full stop on the 2nd line to the ad agency’s intelligence is questioned. Everyone from the CEO to the watchman are invited for blind tests. And finally the agency is given ‘productive feedback’.

If by now you are feeling all sorry for the ad agency…STOP right now…don’t we wish it was as simple as this! Try eavesdropping on a conversation between brand managers and creative agencies and you will realize that far from changing the whole ad….convincing the agency guys to budge an inch is a major achievement, as any brand manager worth his day will testify! How many times have you heard these dramatic proclamations, “this ad does not deliver the right kind of attitude we want to project!”, or “sir please understand the whole impact of the ad will be destructed if we increase the size of the logo by an inch!…” and the less said the better about the practiced looks of exasperation on the faces of the servicing guys.

Being a client myself I have, since a long time, nursed a hurt ego and a notion that maybe agencies run special secret training sessions on ‘how to respond to difficult clients’. I am sure they teach them the art of ‘exaggeration – how to make your creative sound like the best concept after sliced bread’ or ‘time management – how to deal with doped out creative people who wont deliver and give excuses to clients’ & my favourite ‘looks of frustrations – how to pretend nobody, not the client, not their creative teams, not even the wife understands them and how they are too poorly paid for doing this shit!’

Though who gets the worse of the deal, the client or the agency can be a rhetoric I don’t think I want to get into…All this for that one exception or moment of true inspiration which is purely for the good of the brand and unadulterated by the egos of the many people involved!

“The only real valuable thing is intuition” – Albert Einstein

Today I talk about a topic very close to my heart – Intuition.

“I don’t know where it comes from, but its there” is how most intuitive people would describe this characteristic.

More often than not you find such people in creative fields like advertising, content creation, films, art, photography, etc. These are the guys who have a sense of what would be appealing (visually, phonetically, and aurally) to a majority of people. They can look at something and just know what needs to be done to make it more appealing.

Intuition is a funny thing. Most people think its abstract and that you either have it or you don’t. In fact the Myers Briggs Personality Types actually places ‘intuitive’ at the opposite end of ‘sensing’ personality types, suggesting an inverse relationship between intuition and sense! This is because intuition by definition is abstract.

I have always felt that Intuition doesn’t come from the heavens…but it’s just a subconscious process of deduction made possible through an assimilation of a variety of facts, ideas, philosophies and experiences. Somehow through some unexplained process, when bits and pieces of such subconscious thoughts come together to form a definitive conclusion it can be called intuition. Robert Graves puts it aptly when he says, “Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.”

The biggest convincing factor about intuition is that it comes from experience; of a behaviour, a need or an action. Most consumer behaviour is also a result of an assimilation of experiences about the product through a variety of interactions with the brand. The last mile of actual ‘action’ or the ‘impulse’ is where intuition plays a major role.

The role of a marketer is to map the various experiences the consumers have with their brands, use their intuitions about these experiences to develop a product mix strategy and keep evolving through a feedback mechanism / research which tracks these experiences.

If a marketer can understand the role intuition plays in making the final decision to buy or not buy a product, i.e. the last link of the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire > ACTION) model he would have solved a major marketing puzzle.

Ni.

Take a quick poll?

My predictions for 5 bollywood horror flicks in the next 8 weeks!

1) Click (Feb 19)
Prediction: HIT HIT HIT (Well I am biased, its got Shreyas Talpade)

2) Rokkk (March 5th)
Prediction: No one will be able to rokkko it from disappearing…Why, u ask? Do you remember Udita Goswami’s last movie? Well than you wont remember this one either!

3) Swaha – Life beyond superstitions (March 12)
Prediction – With a title like that, need I say more!? (If you find overly made up, Russian ‘actresses’ clad in flimsy shiny pieces of fabric scary, than this one is for you…i am going!)

4) Shapit (March 19)
Which means the cursed – in case you got the pronunciation wrong like I did when I first read it…
Prediction – Has potential, hopefully there wont be an over dose of horror by then.

5) Phoonk 2 (April 9)
Prediction? Nah! Let him surprise us!

That’s all from me folks…let the shows begin.

Ni.

Google: Intuition on the Net

Fluffy white clouds float around with tags,
Chrome colored computer screens become a fad,
Waves crash around on the virtual shore,
Robots named Android run amok in my phone,

Like a fox running away from the fire,
My mind goes haywire,
Will someone show me the light?
And take me out of my plight?

All this chaos is finally making sense
To my rescue is one true friend
Wait, what was his name?
I’ll look it up on Google just the same!

(Pardon the attempt at poetry, but I am about to become one amongst the many who have written about Google, and so I had to start with a bang!)

All these crazy new developments in the world of internet & mobile technology will require a full time career in tracking new apps, operating systems, softwares, etc. just to keep up! The need is really to make life simpler and that’s exactly what Google is up to. The new age of internet & mobile ‘tools’ is all about intuitive adaptation. You think it and they make one. And FAST! At the risk of sounding redundant after I finish typing this post, here is my take on ‘Google: Intuition on the Net’ (GIN)

• Insight: Consumers are using the internet for quick emails, finding take outs joins in the vicinity, watching videos, updating statuses, etc. GIN – Google Chrome OS is meant to be faster and simpler than any other Operating system. The fact that it’s based on the concept of cloud computing and functions off the internet makes it easier to load (less than 7 secs). And its free, Google figures that any sort of activity online will ultimately pay back to them.

• Insight: Keeping minutes of a meeting, sending reports and arranging for car pick up and drops for high profile executives prone to stomach disorders are a huge drain on resources. GIN – Google wave, is Google docs, You tube, Flickr, FB, Skype and any other media that you can think of all under one roof. So you can interact, record, edit and do a lot lot more, all in real time.

• Insight: Internet on the Mobile is the next big thing, and mobile phones are the ultimate multitaskers. GIN – Google Android an OS for mobile phones is built for multitasking, it is a completely customizable, fully stacked (complete with OS, middleware and key mobile applications) open-source mobile platform.

But what I like the best of all things Google, are all the applications that are built around these softwares. This is intuitive adaptation at its best! Take the example of some fascinating applications from the Google labs stable.

‘Google Transliteration’ a cool sounding app, where you can simply type a word the way it would sound in English, and Google will convert it into the local script,

Google Listen – an Android app providing a personalized audio news-magazine loaded with fresh and interesting content whenever it is turned on, or my favorite Google Audio Indexing – which lets you search what people are saying inside Youtube videos, or Image Swirl - a brilliantly user friendly way of searching for images, it groups together pictures which are similar visually or in meaning.

All these and more are part of the ‘halo’ of brand extensions that Google has built around itself. Google is brilliant because it observes & predicts the way we use the internet and is ready to push the envelope with yet another absurdly intuitive application which will wow us.

Spiritual Gaming

This blog was inspired by a random article I read on Sony’s PS3 sales depending on the launch of ‘God of War III’. GOWIII sounds like a big deal, so much that Sony’s consumer tracking reveals that 2 out of 3 people who want to buy this game don’t have a PS3 yet, which implies that PS3 sales are expected to go up by that margin when the game launches!

One comment (which I can assume was from a GOW addict) on the article was, “I have to admit, I am holding out on buying a PS3 until God of War III comes out. There’s a few games I currently want (MGS4, Killzone 2, Resistance & Resistance 2), but I feel that it’s just not enough to justify buying the console. God of War III would finally make me cave.”

The consumer insight here? Gaming hardware and software developers are well aware of the bullying power they have over their buyers. Their magic formula lies in recognizing addiction and feeding it. Gaming addiction has become so serious that, it has been proposed for inclusion in the next version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (source wiki )

In order to feed this addiction, game developers are not only replicating real life (with hugely successful parallel worlds) but also feeding desires / emotions which were not physically possible or probable in real life.

Take the case of this game called ‘PAIN’. The official website says: “PAIN boldly tackles a rarely explored area of video-gaming… comedy.” That! Is the only thing comic about it actually! This game is explicit to say the least. It involves catapulting a man onto an open street while aiming for various strategically placed targets on the horizon. You gain points on how badly the poor fellow hits the targets and on how much he writhes and groans in pain (all this curiously without shedding a drop of blood!) Apparently the absence of blood is important as otherwise there was no way the game would receive a ‘U’ rating. So this means that young kids can now try out this strangely addictive (:-D) game!

The fact that such games are getting developed and gaining momentum is not surprising. The game is exploring yet another human emotion – sadism! If you were to look at the Social media phenomenon, gaming is now adapting to the social media. Your popularity can be judged by the gifts you receive from your neighbors on a farm, an event which is quite unlikely in real life! Your actual neighbors are as likely to give you gifts in real life as you are of assuming the avatar of a Greek god!

But then, video games are all about alternate worlds and alternate realities. Video games transcend physical boundaries and exist in the metaphysical. They are a figment of our imagination, yet inspire absolutely ‘real’ emotions. They seem to posses a universal consciousness, follow an order and a justice in things and inspire a certain detachment from reality…

In that sense, gaming is almost…well spiritual!

I watch TV, therefore I am

Lying on my bed last night with a bout of insomnia, I was amazed at how difficult it was to just ‘be’ with myself. I was restless and wanted something to do…countless ideas on various things that can be done, came in my mind and were pushed back out, but left me amazed about how we are constantly on the look out for an external source of entertainment or happiness. Ok without getting too philosophical, I will get to the point. The fact that reality shows are bigger than real life, just proves how disillusioned we actually are with the current crop of entertainment being dolled out to us on TV and in life in general.

Now we all know about the ill effects of sitting in front of a TV all day. Apart from obesity, back pain and poor eyesight, TV has been proved to have a mind numbing (I like to call it the ‘idiotifying’) effect on humans, who start to believe that they live inside the idiot box rather than outside it. Increasingly TV is getting major competition from the internet on this particular aspect, but that story’s for another day! We are no longer content with regressive soaps or with juvenile pleasures gained from Hindi cinema, but crave for some new ‘time passes’ and here comes reality TV to our rescue. The lack of event or purpose in our lives makes us susceptible to the TV bug, which is always on the lookout for lost souls like us.

Coming back to reality tv, if we were to go by wiki’s definition of reality tv, its basically non-scripted content involving ‘real people’ or ‘non-actors’. Either wiki will soon get an updated definition or the current version of reality tv will get a new name! Reality shows are anything but ‘real’, we all know that! At a recently held industry meet, the panelists (eminent people from the Indian TV industry) discussed fiction vs. non-fiction (reality) content and almost admitted to there being no difference between the two! Well atleast they were being honest about scripting ‘reality’ tv, gotta appreciate them for that! So now it’s official that these over hyped, over dramatized reality shows are nothing but compact versions of the same soaps that we watch on tv.

So why do they exist?

For a channel perspective, their GRPs (Gross Rating Points) apparently don’t justify the huge spends on reality shows (on an avg. reality shows can be said to cost anything from 1-1.5 cr/episode, 10x of any regular soap). For the audiences, they aren’t getting anything new, just repackaged & beautified old stuff. So why do they exist? For the exact reasons that have been mentioned above.

We talk about upholding Indian culture and such hum bug, but the only culture we are really handing down is driven by absolute lack of initiative and of time. We are too busy to take our kids out or to read to them, somehow preferring the welcome break tv brings to both our lives. But have we considered the long term effects of the same…

Our kids are learning new manipulation techniques, which involve amongst other things stripping for votes, gems of wisdom on how to succeed in life by back stabbing and plotting, understanding the real meaning of racial and sexual discrimination, realizing that eating helpless bugs proves that one is fearless! Not to mention imbibing a whole new language consisting mainly of beeps preceded by a limited number of choice alphabets.

Human social behavior as we see it is changing with limited physical exposure to one’s kind. With the consequent lack of any sort of outlet therefore, people are soon becoming zombies living in an alternate reality, getting by with the sadistic amusement provided by these reality shows and believing them to be the prime of quality entertainment available.

Here’s hoping we soon wake up from our reverie, get tired of looking into lives of equally vulnerable creatures, stop grinning to ourselves on the pathetic nature of them all and go get a life!!

Inspiration….

Sometimes the best and easiest source of inspiration is found by simply stumbling through the net….i do that often while writing creative copy, or articles, or deciding upon the color scheme of the next presentation, etc. As something totally unrelated might catch your fancy and give you a good idea for the work at hand…

I did a live stumble to prove my point and here’s what it threw up….

1st site: http://www.readprint.com/work-705/The-Road-Not-Taken-Robert-Frost
– eerily i was looking for inspiration and came upon ‘the road less traveled’ by Robert Frost!! How creepy is that!! (*Stumbleupon reading my thoughts? Is that the next generation of technology?)

2nd site: http://www.cgunit.net/2009/06/mcbess-matthieu-bessudo.html
Well this is pretty arbit, but next time my agency asks me to give an example of ‘exactly what i mean when i say more illustration options’ i have this to show them!!

3rd site: http://www.alice.org/
ok once in a while there is absolutely irrelevant stuff…

4th site: http://www.innerrewards.com/topics/skincare/articles/ir-a-guide-to-sunscreen-and-sunblock-510
Some more irrelevant stuff….beware of diversions like these, specially if you are facing a tanning problem as it might distract you from your main purpose….i.e. creative inspiration…ok where were we??

Oh ya 5th site: http://www.desicolours.com/have-you-ever-been-so-tired/14/06/2009
Hey! My favorite kind of site….cool pics which you might not find when you need them and are perfect for adding that comic element to your presentation!! So if you stumble across them like i did now…be sure to book mark them…

Will quit stumbling now…you get the drift!

My Quote of the post: “We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” - Winston Churchill

Ni.

My first blog post…

hi!

I am a media executive from Mumbai…as my job involves a lot of writing…it was about time i started something related to work!! Here it is…

This is a blog about ideas and creativity….if you are a marketer or a brand person or even someone looking out for ideas in your life….hopefully there will be enough material to inspire!

I am going to start with some basic ideas related to my work, lets see where that leads us….in the mean time…you are welcome to contribute with your comments / suggestions / brickbats!!

So here goes…

Ni.