Karthik S | beastoftraal.com

Elephant conservation, via PR and advertising

July 22, 2021 by Karthik S

Last month, an elephant that smashed through a kitchen wall at a home in Thailand made news globally. While it was funny to see countless memes around it (including one that made me laugh out loud; it had the elephant’s pic along…

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User-generated ‘slow down’

July 21, 2021 by Karthik S

Back in 2018, the Indian Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) released a new set of rules for automobile manufacturers in India. Apart from new rules regarding seat belt reminders and airbags, there was one more important rule: speed alert warning…

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Cadbury India’s mass auto-response, 6 years after Maggi crisis

July 20, 2021 by Karthik S

Back in 2015, Nestle’s Maggi faced online what we can, in hindsight, call the first big social media storm of India. Armed with the news that Maggi contained MSG, assorted people took to social media to question a brand that they all…

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Positioning: inside-out vs. outside-in

July 19, 2021 by Karthik S

Sony co-founder Akio Morita, in his iconic book ‘Made in Japan’, adds a lot of background details on how and why the Walkman was invented. Besides the more obvious reasons that we can intuitively guess now—portability, personal content consumption (of music), and…

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Budweiser India’s 2nd marketing misfire in 4 months

July 16, 2021 by Karthik S

Budweiser India had a marketing misfire in April this year when they got Messi portraits painted over existing street art in Mumbai and Delhi. It was widely called out as a ‘hijack’ where commercial advertising hijacked over organic street art. However, the…

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A marketing idea for the real estate segment

July 15, 2021 by Karthik S

Open any print newspaper on the weekends—across India—and you may see tons of large ads by real estate brands. Week after week! The real estate category has a fairly long gestation period for sales closure – given the high cost involved, they…

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Picking product features to advertise

July 14, 2021 by Karthik S

I had written about true wireless earbuds in March this year – on how they advertise their features to make a marketing pitch. The most common positioning seems to be built on the following features: fit (that it will stay!) touch-based features…

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