First of all I would like to thank Sahil Dev for asking me a question which made me take the effort of putting down my thoughts.
The Hero Honda JV recently broke apart with both entities deciding they should part ways. This led to the birth of Hero Motocorp. The company chose the 15th of August 2011 (India’s Independence Day) to launch a nation-wide rebranding exercise. I remember seeing the ad the first time and discussing with someone how brilliantly Hero has incorporated a lot of things into one advertisement. But …

Among all the hullabaloo and talk about good brands targeting the youth in India, I think one brand just did not get its true share (till this post was written that is! ). This company launched its brand of mobile phones sometime back and really created a lot of churn. Here was a company giving the user cutting edge features at a competitive price. And the innovation was really well targeted, most of the features based on current market needs and trends. But we are not here to discuss …

There is a famous Scottish proverb about procrastination – “What may be done at any time will be done at no time”. Months ago I started researching on this topic which caught my fancy and found out a few half-baked ideas. That idea of course required the explanation of a concept – The Concept of Increasing Returns and I did it. After that though one thing led to another and I never ended up presenting the thought in its totality to readers. Here I intend to bring that task I …

Statutory Warning – This highly opinionated article you are reading is from a man deeply hurt by the recent exercise undertaken by Airtel. To me Airtel is about everything that is great about Indian marketing. It is about us getting it right, making all the right noises and building a brand over the period of 15 years brick-by-brick. As a student of strategy, finance and brands what has been done to it in the name of rebranding as I see it is nothing short of blasphemy towards an iconic and …

Let me at the outset warn you that this is going to be a longish read. But if you stick it out I hope you find something of value here.
One definition of Positioning goes like this – “Positioning is the art of selecting, out of a number of unique selling propositions, the one which will get you the maximum sales”. It brings to the brand manager’s table a whole range of differentiating strategies. These strategies they say revolve around 4 questions posed on its behalf –
1) Who am I?
2) What …

(I would like to thank Prof. Anindya Sen, Professor, Economics Group, IIM Calcutta for his invaluable inputs and the enlightening discussions through which he gave me numerous insights without which this article would surely have been incomplete.)
Before we move ahead with this article, I would like to make the disclosure that this article takes more of an Economists view of Advertising and the interactions between firms in an industry. Given this there has to be some leeway while examining the concept presented here. Especially in some cases the cause and …