Category: Common sense marketing
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The Lightness of Brands.
The lightness of brands. Reality has two sides –the heaviness of worries, anxieties, uncertainties, responsibilities, roles…and lightness of love, laughter, kindness, fun, hope, shared memories… Brands have historically belonged to the lighter side of life. Hope, excitement, and optimism sit at the very core of brands. Hope & optimism are not mere idle thoughts. They […]
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“Insights” as revelations of hidden optionalities
As the world moves faster and drags the advertising industry along with it, the concept of ‘insight’, which resolutely stood at the centre of the advertising industry for long, is appearing blurred. Often, we find ourselves in meeting rooms sharing a scratch of the head, “what’s an insight, anyways?”. Here’s my take. What is an […]
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Optionality Framework: A Brand Strategy Framework for a World in Flux.
Note: This article adapts NN Taleb’s idea about ‘optionality’ from his excellent book ‘ Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder‘; and uses research from Richard Bulliet’s book The Camel and the Wheel. Camel or a car? Can you imagine a day when everyone around you stops using automobiles and instead starts riding camel? It turns […]
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A matter of dialing ‘it’ up or down
As a strategic planner, I try to make choices clear for a marketer: for example, whether a campaign needs to talk about ‘new ingredients’, ‘benefit of new ingredients’, ‘advantage of the product’, emotional pitch for the brand and so on. Now, for a reasonable person, making that choice, though not easy, is possible. All it […]
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What is “Positioning”? Separating faff from fact.
<Cryptic high brow summation> Knowing simply what something is, is not enough. One must know what is it for, to know it well. </Cryptic high brow summation> 1. Positioning as a consumer’s idea of your brand Recently, I was left scratching my head after an hour of brainstorming session with my colleagues for re-positioning a […]
Truth About Branding 