Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
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…
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…
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…
Almost all businesses are created and run on the basis of customers coming to them more than once – hopefully, many times. All social media platforms (and their mobile apps) are built on the basis that people use them relentlessly. The more…
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently wished the Dalai Lama recently on the latter’s 86th birthday, on July 6, 2021. This is of course entirely normal. Modi wishes a lot of international and Indian dignitaries on their birthdays and I’m sure he…
Ola co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal did something interesting recently. He took a test ride of Ola’s soon-to-be-launched electric scooter. Here is the video that he shared. That brings me to two different threads of thought: Bhavish posing as a user of…
“Antarctica hits record temperature of 18.3 degrees Celsius, UN confirms”. When I saw this headline a few days ago, I literally fell from my seat. 18 degrees is the temperature in Ooty. That simply cannot be the temperature in Antarctica! There must…