The Nano, if you recall, took its avatar to rescue the struggling section of the Indian middle class families to thundering applause from the world in general. The car is widely seen as a fine case of using a company’s PR machinery effectively for marketing a product. And it is not difficult to see reason in the argument – before spending a single rupee towards marketing the product, everyone was already talking about the car. The cacophony grew louder as the product was first unveiled in 2008 and broke to …

One of my favorite scenes from the movie ‘Fight Club’ is the ending scene when Edward  Norton, with his head all blown up, is staring at the concrete jungle spread out in  front him as the buildings start blowing up and The Pixies’ Where is my mind starts  playing in the background. Research in Motion is a company that had every single  individual working in such buildings dancing to their BBM tones till not so long ago.  That was no small following of loyal corporate fans! In 2009, Fortune …

While India prepares itself for the final month of the CAT season (I am still astonished that people don’t realize that the CAT derives its name from the only Common Animal Type, namely the cat, missing from the Chinese calendar; a consequence of strained diplomatic ties with China post the Sino-India War of 1962), we at The Marketers felt it would be a good idea to write a short article that attempts to give MBA aspirants some basic insight into the world of marketing.
Airtel recently released a new print 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 …

By now, all of us would have seen the fresh set of ads from Vodafone. I am referring to the campaign about Rs. 4 plan, featuring a weird green creature, which after some research on the net, found out, is a parrot. Finally, after a lot of adulation, quite a few awards, and some criticism from a few quarters, Vodafone seems to have retired the Zoozoo brigade, and have brought in a new protagonist. Let’s see how it’s different from the earlier ads, and if there is more to the …

Most of us are aware of the phrase ‘Product Life Cycle (PLC)’. For the uninitiated, I shall give a very brief description before I begin with the main topic. According to the PLC concept, a product’s life is divided into 4 major stages: introduction, growth, maturity and decline. In the growth stage, since the category is relatively new, promotion is focused on communicating functional benefits, generally to a small consumer segment. In the growth stage, when a decent number of customers are aware of its existence, the promotional focus stays …