Butchering a brand

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When I first heard about this day care centre that goes by the name - Kanchana Paati, I was excited. Actually what a name??? Then I got closer, visited their website ... surprise, surprise more..the designs were so appropriate, the colors the fonts captured it all. The bigger surprise... I know the guy behind this - Suri.

I caught up with him, even worked closely with him for 3 days and I realised that he was Butchering the Brand and not trying to create it... The anxiety of make more money sometimes can make you disregard the neccessity to nurture the brand and build on it, well if it naturally ages its probably okay.. but when ones orientation to 'numbers' becomes an obsession design and class rushes out.

This is exactly what happend to Kanchana Paati. Roots & Wings a excellent brand ( nowhere near Kanchana Paati as a brand name) launches its centre in Annanagar and the person heading the centre is an ex-Kanchana Paati employee. The reaction to this is some small boards put up around Annanagar ...ugly eyesore.

This my dear, is the end of the brand Kanchana Paati.

Rental Bargain from a clothes store.

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IT has been 22 years since Irving Shulman shortened the name of his discount clothing chain from Daffy Dan’s to Daffy’s in a bid to class up the brand, which was known for goofy marketing stunts like perching mannequins on the roof so passers-by would run in to warn of suicide jumpers, then hopefully stay for the bargains.

Today Daffy’s is one of the oldest operating discount chains in the Northeast. But lately it has found itself in competition with some unlikely rivals: luxury department stores like Saks and Neiman Marcus that have started advertising on Daffy’s turf, stressing low prices over fashion or luxury.

“If you walk down the street, every shop window’s got a discount sign on it now,” said Jan Jacobs, co-founder of Johannes Leonardo, Daffy’s new creative agency, which is backed by the WPP Group. Daffy’s has had a firm hold on the off-price market since it was founded 48 years ago, he said, “but because of the economy and everyone offering discounts, they are disappearing into the background.”

Looking to reclaim the discount mantle, Daffy’s is starting a quirky marketing campaign centered on a contest that will award one person the kind of value not generally associated with a clothing store: a one-year lease on a fully furnished $7,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood at $700 a month.

More to read on this at New York Times

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Make Face Time

This cant continue, the formless bodiless living on cyberspace.

Get off the internet,power down, log off, unplug ... make face time.
“Make face time,” was created by McCann Erickson for Dentyne chewing gum.
People under 20 are the most avid gum chewers, the industry says, and the Dentyne campaign touches on the explosion in digital tools that help those young people connect, share and network. But it also seeks to make customers stop and question whether all that online communication is really making them closer.

“What’s meaningful is being reminded that being face to face can’t be substituted.” Read More

Jonah Berger -

"Communication. Consumers want other people to think certain things about them, and so they wear clothes that communicate particular identities. Conspicuous consumption, or spending lots of money on visible goods, is a good way to try and communicate wealth, but this signal breaks down when any wannabe can buy a certain car or handbag. What were once status symbols become just aspirational markers rather than the real thing. Consequently, insiders may engage in more inconspicuous consumption to signal only to others in the know. Such subtle signals may be almost invisible to the mainstream, and this helps maintain their cache." Marketing expert Jonah Berger
Dogs on the Street, Pumas on Your Feet:
How Cues in the Environment Influence
Product Evaluation and Choice

Where Consumers Diverge from Others:
Identity Signaling and Product Domains

Contextual priming: Where people vote
affects how they vote

Listening without hearing

The U.S. military bankrolled early development of a non-lethal microwave weapon that creates sound inside your head, instead of using high power to create an intolerable noise, it might be used at low power to produce a whisper that was too quiet to perceive consciously but might be able to subconsciously influence someone. The directional beam could be used for targeted messages, such as in-store promotions. Subliminal advertising, beaming information that is not consciously heard . While the effectiveness of subliminal persuasion is dubious, I can see there might be some organizations interested in this capability. And if that doesn't work, you could always point the thing at birds. They seem to be highly sensitive to microwave audio, so it might be used to scare flocks away from wind farms -- or shoo pigeons from city streets.
Read more in Wired

Have we all surrendered to the Internet

Andrew Sullivan writes in the Times of India that Internet particular Google has done wonderful things, but are we losing the quietness of our literary, intellectual and spiritual life

Reading one book for a while allows the theme to resonante, today we flit around, multi task and dont allow our mind to reside on one subject. We dont hav etime to think things throught and allow themselves to entertain a thought before commiting it.

He quotes Nicholas Carr who says "Information may be free, but, as Horning explains, it exacts a price in the time required to collect, organize, and consume it. As we binge on the Net, the time available for other intellectual activities - like, say, thinking - shrinks. Eventually, we get bloated, mentally, and a kind of intellectual nausea sets in. But we can't stop because - hey - it's free."