Business is Marketing

In June 2014, Google launched a new version of Android named AndroidOne that would help smartphone makers to make very cheap smartphones. This latest software platform will be launched in India first in collaboration with three smartphone manufacturers: Micromax, Spice and Karbonn. Google has partnered with these three manufacturers so that they can pool in resources and make high quality, low priced smartphones.     The mission? Google and the head of its Android division Sundar Pichai want the next one billion smartphone users to be their customers. How? Google will do all the hard work. It is figuring out all the material costs and giving support to all the low-end smartphone manufacturers. And not just the software support, but also the hardware support. This is being done to decrease the total cost of the phone to try and keep it under $100. Add to this the fact that Google will also invest Rs.100 crores with its partners on advertising and marketing of the $100 smartphon...

The way we communicate has changed today. Branding is a dif ferent game altogether. The strat egy that was considered the right way to build a brand just a few years back is all wrong today. We, as market ers, were doing a great job all these years and then came Tim Berners-Lee and changed it all. He is the man who invent ed the ‘World Wide Web’. With more than 2 billion users the growth in the number of people using the Internet in 2013, as compared to 2000, has been 566%. Whoa! That’s humongous. It’s this Inter net which has created a unique genera tion of consumers called the ‘Millennial’. People in the age group of 18-34 fall in this category. Why are they so important? Let’s look at a few quick facts. 75 million is the population of the Millennials in US alone. In countries like India and Bangla desh most of the population is around this age. What it translates into is a few simple facts. By 2022 at least 30% of all retail sales will be to this generation, and by 2025 about 75% of...