The sport is proving to be too much of a good thing, and then not even that.
Friday the 13th. Contrary to what the date suggested, it turned out to be a brilliant, sunny day at Perth. For the Indian cricket team and the hapless Indian cricket fan, though, it could not have been gloomier. The much vaunted Indian test batting line-up that has scored an aggregate of over 50,000 test runs among them and who have put most attacks and bowlers to the sword, folded up for a mere 161 (yet again) after being put in to bat. That was not all. David Warner, who made his reputation in the Indian Premier League, bit the hand that fed him by doing a Virender Sehwag on us, as Shashi Tharoor cleverly tweeted. Around 2.30 p.m. on that fateful day, I called my long-time friend and co-cricket lover to commiserate with him. If anything he has been more cricket-mad than me, faithfully getting up at 4.30 a.m. for a 5 a.m. cricket match and sitting dutifully in front of the television, coffee mug in hand. But he shocked me, when I asked him the score. “I have switched off,” he said.
Anna Hazare and his campaign against corruption was one of the most widely followed stories on the media last year.
The ad industry's attention was once again drawn to people processes.
I met the head of the Indian operations of a large MNC a few days ago and asked him how the year had been and he made a telling comment. “Well, the only thing I can tell you is that I am glad 2011 is over.” The Indian cricket fan too would endorse the sentiment entirely, as contrary to bookmakers' predictions and my own hopes, India slumped to an embarrassing defeat in the Boxing Day test, which thankfully ended the cricketing action for the year.
For the Indian consumer in 2011, economy was distinct from parsimony, and values too, came to the forefront.
The Boxing Day test is overshadowing even the deadline of my year-end column. In a sense it is easier to review the past than to predict the future. So let me stay with the past (as befitting people of my age) and not worry unduly about the outcome of India's Australia tour even if I can feel the excitement of a possible Indian win (after ages) in every pore of my body. How was the year for marketing and the consumer? And what about the poor advertising agency? As usual I believe in the collective wisdom of my peers many of whom are storehouses and repositories of information on marketing and the consumer just as Wisden has always been on cricket. So I humbly dedicate this column (errors et al) to my quietly wise friends whom I reached out to in my hour of need.
A new value-seeker
Thanks to reports of doom and gloom the average Indian consumer has stopped splurging. (Or has he?)
The erstwhile leader in colour television is looking to diversify in a host of areas to stay afloat.
Recently, when it was reported that BPL had failed to salvage part of its 350-acre land bank pledged with Deutsche Bank, it was a setback for a company that used to be among the leaders in many consumer durable segments in the late nineties.
Sample this: In its heyday, the brand value of BPL was valued at Rs 1,400 crore – a trend-setting parameter which many Indian companies followed later. But within the next decade, they have almost lost it all.
Fall of the mighty: BPL realised the value of investing in technology, but more significantly invested in the brand. So what went wrong? (Above) A file photo of the launch of a BPL TV _ G. R. N. SOMASHEKAR
“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” - William Pollard
It is 5.30 a.m. on the first day of the Australian Test cricketing season and I am sitting in front of my TV set as I have done for several years now to watch a lightweight contest between two ordinary teams, one of which has three youngsters making their test debut. As both teams strive for success on a cloudy day at The Gabba, my mind wanders to other examples of success and failure from the world of business. While success is rare and difficult to achieve, we need to remember that history is full of successful people who have lost their way due to arrogance and leading brands which have led their popularity to blind them to the pitfalls on the road to sustaining success. Let's take a look at some of the brands that have been consumed by arrogance or short-sightedness and see if there is any learning for our own future conduct.
The human race is a wonderful species. It must be the only species that can actually exult at someone else's misery. Children specialise in this. However, I must quickly add that some older people are similarly gifted. Have you ever noticed (gleefully) the anguish a middle-aged woman experiences when she sees her first grey hair, or her horror when the mirror shows up her first wrinkle? Her pain, I am sure, is greater than that of the entire Australian nation that watched in disbelief as its cricket team was shot out for the mammoth score of 47 last week! Yes, wrinkles or greying are all tell-tale signs of ageing and no self-respecting woman would like that. And yet, I admire their dread of ageing, even though it is part of evolution.
Ageing is as relentless as forty-year-olds needing spectacles to read the newspaper. However, it is a completely different story when it comes to people like me who have needed spectacles for the last forty years to see anything. But I am rambling and will not try to stay with the process of ageing. I wish people in brand management were as paranoid about the ageing of their brands as their spouses are about their own looks. Yes, we have lots to learn from our spouses (and every other woman) if only we stop to observe them. (And one has also heard that watching women is a pleasurable occupation though one always wishes that one had done more of it.)
The King of Good Times is battling bad times, and all eyes are waiting to see how much the whole bailout issue will cost Brand Kingfisher. Right now, the airline business of Kingfisher is under deep scrutiny and the media focus has only heightened the negative atmosphere. Public memory, of course, is short and all ‘bailout’, ‘bleeding’ and ‘those who die must die’ phrases will be forgotten once Vijay Mallya is able to arrange the corpus to manage the airline’s functioning. Remember, Jet Airways employees’ protests against job cuts some years ago didn’t do much harm to the brand in the long run.
Kingfisher, known primarily for its beer, is unlikely to be affected. The brand has been there for a long time and people vouch for it. Even in this scenario, it’s the airline business that is under the scanner. The airline business is diversification of the core business, hence the impact on Kingfisher the brand would not be much. But when it comes to Kingfisher Airlines, people – especially frequent flyers and privileged guests wooed with the airline’s promise of an extraordinary experience – would stay away, considering flight cancellations and the consequent inconvenience.
Stellar outing: The F1 event showcased India’s event handling capabilities much more favourably than the Commonwealth Games could. - Photo : Rajeev Bhatt
On October 31, I was at Lucknow to celebrate a landmark birthday of my classmate from IIM Bangalore. It was a unique experience to be in Mayawati's kingdom, but I shall resist the urge to talk about statues and parks with huge, forbidding walls and stay with the events that India and the world witnessed around that time.
The media in Lucknow was showering praise on Mayawati for helping organise the F1 event, taking place in Noida at that time. Although it was largely a private sector initiative, the papers, in Lucknow at least, spoke in glowing terms about the support that behenji had provided to make the event a great success.
"Bangalore as a Brand has registered its mark world wide as the Software hub, thanks to companies like Infosys and Wipro. However the image of Bangalore as a brand is getting tarnished because of poor Infrastructure and governance, the city is in need of a "Brand Champion".
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The sport is proving to be too much of a good thing, and then not even that.
