Dense commentary on social media, PR, marketing, advertising and branding.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Two brand ads that ask parents to ‘make time’, but how each brand goes about doing it says a lot about the brands (as well as the agencies, I suppose). First, P&G’s Tide washing powder. Armed with an IMRB data point that…