You step into an outlet, find it playing awesome music. You feel the need to know more about the song, so you take out your mobile phone, activate an app called Shazam which captures a piece of the live music and gives you full details of the song including lyrics. Phew…. it was easy, wasn’t it? The joy gets doubled by the fact that you had downloaded it on your phone for free!
The journey of the mobile phone from a hand-held communications device to a platform where communication, computing, entertainment …

How much is too much? Generally this is a question that marketing managers of a company do not ask when it comes to the net sales. Depending on the sector and the kind of product, perhaps they should.
The concept
De-marketing is a concept that endorses the line of thought mentioned above. The concept came to fore back in 1971 when Kotler and Levy defined it as ““discouraging customers in general or a certain class of customers in particular on either a temporary or a permanent basis”. In further expositions on the …

The economic recession of 2008 led to a slew of media articles pertaining to the corporate world leaping in the rural market to take care of the plummeting topline. “Rural Marketing” became a buzzword and the panacea that would cure the frail health of the economy. And cure it did! But while acknowledging the fact that many companies developed an orientation towards the rural markets in that phase one must also acknowledge that rural marketing was a big game from before the recession. Here are some pointers – a) The …

The past few days have seen some very competitive advertisements clog the Indian consumer space. Indigo set the cat among the pigeons by unleashing a half-page comparative advertisement in all prominent newspapers which denounced its rivals and tried establishing the supremacy of Indigo on the basis of various performance related data sourced from DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation). The next big news in this segment was the HUL advertisement centered around the performance of Rin vis-a-vis its P&G rival detergent Tide. The driver for this campaign seemed to be …

With the launch of Nano, Tata became a world-wide story in a way no other Indian industrial group has been able to become. However, today’s post is about their first foray into the small/mid-size car segment in India which happened way back in 1998 with Indica. Maruti-Suzuki was the leader in the small car segment (Class A) and as is Tata’s wont, they created a new segment with Indica – that of small big car, larger than Maruti 800 and cheaper than the available Class B variants. Also, confident due …

(One of our regular readers, Nitin Chauhan, asked about the efficacy of BTL in FMCG in the Gyaan-on-Demand section of our website. This post is a reply to his query. This article has been written by Sreekanth Reddy P., (PGDM 2008-’10, IIM Calcutta) with inputs from Shashank Kumar and Pratik Prakash.)
Below the line marketing is well established as one of the most effective ways of communicating with the customer, and particularly important in a field like FMCG, where customer loyalty is lower than other areas. The final purchase decision of …