Business is Marketing

Ask yourself the reason why, while feverishly flipping through this magazine, you’ve suddenly stopped at this particular article! Is it because you have religiously followed this section on marketing strategies for the past year? Well, is that so?!? A man walked into a large room full of people. He was supposed to address them. However, no one was paying attention and it was too noisy to be audible to all. So he went up to a board that was kept there and wrote something. There was a sudden silence in the room as everyone waited for him to speak. The man started, “Now that I have your attention, I will start my talk...” All that he had written was “SEX,” in bold letters on the board and had managed to get the attention of every single person in the room. ‘Sex’ is one word, which arouses a lot of curiosity and has a strong psychological appeal. Is it true then that sex sells? Well, a recent study showed that sex in print advertisements improved the effectiveness of the advertisement, mad...

Everything you did right last year, seems to be stuttering away to glorious ignominy this year; competition’s biting painfully hard; sales are stabbing away; consumers aren’t even giving a third glance; the heat seems to be getting too hot... If you’re at your wit’s end, relax, we’ve got the mother of all solutions – give away your product... for FREE! My six year old walked into a departmental store and went up to the gentleman at the counter and asked him, “Which one of these packets have the free gifts inside them? Please show me.” My jaw dropped as I watched him shop along piling things onto the shopping cart on the basis of which car, or Power Ranger toy or Superman projector they had inside them. Soon I realized I had four untouched packets of Kellogg’s Chocos, and many Sunfeast biscuits and Horlicks bottles. Once the “free gift” was taken out of them, they were abandoned by my little one, leaving me the headache of finishing them off. My first reaction to this shopping escapade ...

“I feel it in my fingers I feel it in my toes, The love is all around me, And so the feeling grows”... I have been humming this song for days, and wondering why! It’s one of my favourites, but not one to be sung for days. I tried to figure out why, and then realized that everywhere I looked, every shop I went to, every website I visited, every dinner I attended, there was one thing that was always present; and that too in large doses – love! Yes, I realized it’s that time of the year when love is on sale, everybody, everything, is drenched in “red,” the colour of love. The red hearts, the red roses are just ‘unmissable’. If Saint Valentine were here, he would have been a very happy saint, for what he did in secret and under great fear, is today being done so openly and with so much gusto that even those remotely aware of him cannot miss this day. Of Chocolates and Teddy Bears If legend were to be believed, then Saint Valentine was a priest during the third century in Rome. At that time...