As the 'Divine Mother' peeks through the clouds, I can feel her.
She's all excited and has started packing for herself n her kids n yeah the sweet Lord Shiva too.....'coz by now she has known that he's going to come down too and play peek-a-boo with us, while he makes sure that everything is safe for all that he cares for: 'us' :)
I can't wait to see you all here; happily blessing us all and partying for five days, while we run around you trying to make you happy.
Come down quickly O' Dear Durga, come down and enchant us with your divine beauty, your sanctity, your eternal love, your faith on us that we will be good no matter what we've given to you thus far! Come and bathe us all in your holy divinity and bless the world as always!

Assessing ROI from blah…blah….blah….

‘Word of Mouth’ (WoM) is the buzzword today. What and How do our customers think? What are their beliefs? What do they value most? What would they like to have? ….are just a few questions that every business needs to keep track of in order to be out there. Simple as these little questionettes sound, they are the hardest to answer. A customer’s WoM can provide a gist of answers to all of the above. So, let’s go for it! Companies today are effervescent with ways to tack down every WoM that directly/indirectly relates to them. The Idea is to invade the coterie by becoming a part of it, or to just create one, to figure out what people think. Given that consumers are more expressive to a larger audience now, tasks are simpler now than how they were even a decade ago.

Expressions are ON: blogs, social networking sites and groups therein, RSS, chat threads, you name it! So, the catch is to keep track of any conversation that involves the company concerned, assess it, and register it by feeding it back on the relevant ROI measure.

Johnson & Johnson, Nike, Reebok, Horlicks, Sunsilk,…are companies that have taken to hold reins in their own hands. They’ve created interactive sites where consumers can choose their preferred segment (e.g. Reebok – Women – Style – etc.), engage in an activity of their choice, or just chat with fellow consumers. The activities available for consumers in such sites are most often designed to extract information on what they like, or would like, in disguise of a fun-game or an activity that interests. Check the Sunsilk ‘Gang of Girls’, Horlicks Women site (http://www.indianwomenshealth.com/index.aspx), or Reebok site for instances. The purpose is simple and the process runs in cycles: read their minds, reflect and entice them, re-read them, ……and stay on top forever. It is after the re-reading exercise that ROI assessments can be made. There are several ways to gauge ROI from the ‘blabber’.

• # of times your brand was uttered in a thread/forum/…
• - An evaluative assessment of ‘in what light was it uttered’ (+ve, -ve, neutral), and accounting likewise.
• An assessment of where the brand stands vis-à-vis what consumers want from a particular product (class/type)
• What is the spread?
• How many different types of people/communities have shown interest in your brand?
• Consumers’ intention to purchase the brand
• For the 1^st time
• Repeatedly
• Conclusion from a specific discussion (mostly relevant for assessing chat threads)
• Simply tracking the # instances where a particular brand was searched for on Google, Yahoo, and the likes

There can be other ways, or a mix (2 or more) of the above ways (whichever is more relevant for the brand concerned) to assess ROI from discussions on the web.

The bottom-line is: We have known and respected the value of C2C ever since competition crept in and we knew that we had to aim for the customers HEAD and HEART. However, that we are going for it and incorporating it in our performance metrics is a recent phenomenon (though quite sparse till date) and it definitely gives us a more assuring image of where we stand, not just today, but also in the near future. Knowing what consumers are looking for has become a lot easier now, and whoever gives that a miss is going to be missed soon in the rat-race for enticing and befriending the smart info-savvy consumer.

Advertising.....at it's Worst!

"Over the line? You're so far past the line that you can't even see the line. The Line is a Dot to you!" ...... Joey (F.R.I.E.N.D.S) to Chandler when Chandler was trying to apologize by saying how he realized that he had gone over the line.

Well, this could be said to another set of people too :-)

I recently read this article in ‘Advertising Age’ about a particular viral ad on air for the Extended Stay Hotels (ESH). I couldn't wait to come back to my room and check the ad myself. You know how ads are supposed to be Attractive? Yeah … that’s the word…. ‘ATTRACTIVE’ = Interesting & hence, Rememberable, for the featured product/brand/….

I guess the creative team at Mullen, Winston-Salem didn’t quite get that link. As per one of their creative pieces for the ESH, an ad should be just Rememberable……by hook or by crook. So, when they were at there ridiculous best, they designed this ad where a pretty brainless lass enters an ESH room, heads straight for the sink and cutlery area, opens the drawer and picks up a spoon. She takes a keen look at it and….. Golly…..she licks it, front and back and?????? You tell me what next!
Yeah she keeps it back, from where she had picked it.
Yukkkk!

Then she moves around the room, licks everything that she could lay her hands on. No one has spoken anything yet in the ad.
To the horror of people who are still watching the ad, she enters the bathroom. Yes…she does! She licks the bath curtain, looks naughtily at the camera and starts licking the toilet seat and bowl. The ad ends when she looks, very happily at the camera and says “Very Clean!” Next she displays her palm to us where we read “extstay.com”.
I said, “What????”

So, these “creative” bunch of people went over the line [Yes creative in QUOTES ….. if whoever makes an ad is supposed to be tagged as creative; I’d tag them Stupid, and so Stupid that they didn’t realize that they should’ve buried this shameful evidence of their bizarre heads, as soon as they had seen what they had made]! How could they make it, and how could the ESH group buy it and, worse still, Air it?

The ad is on the internet; no background music or fancy backdrop. The idea was probably to make it look original, aiming to give the audience a feel of the cutting edge ‘Word of Mouth’ impact. Yeah they have done their home-works in reading ‘what’s IN’, but have happily chucked out ‘what’s Sensible’.

People would hate this ad so much, that they’d remember ESH alright, but whenever they do, even when they’re trying to pick one hotel, they’d wince at the gross display of licked stuffs….EVERYWHERE at ESH. Who’d buy them?

What the Bling was worth…..

The best brains of the world were riding the bling of working at the fancy designer back-office. Floating on this back-office bubble since the late 1990’s, we were wrenching and writhing our brains in shuffling and reshuffling papers and trading them between pockets. A whopping 200,000+ work at present in the securities industry, in the NY state alone. What we desperately need at all times (not just at times like today) is a fair delegation of our grays (young and old) amongst both back and front offices. Engineers, entrepreneurs, VCs, …. we need them all: synchronized and complementing each other, in every heave with the macro-tunes. In following the lust for the mint, we had lost focus from the invincible laws of sustenance: ‘Create AND Manage’; we were all hogging at the latter. As an article in Wall Street Journal signed out today…. “The market has indeed spoken……It’s time to get back to work. Real Work”.

short of the last buck ....

The sky's been roaring today; since morning.
"Why are you angry?" I asked him. "& who're you angry at?"
"Myself!" he snapped back, wearing a pout.
"Why? What did you do?"
"Nothing" he sighed and looked at me, still pouting.
I tugged at his grumpy cheek and asked - "Then what makes you angry my dear?"
He looked at me, confused now; "ahh.... I want to clutch myself and colour me so loud that the world would shine in my light. But I'm so bored!"
Someone had said that Success is 99% inspiration and 1% perspiration. Its that last little buck that my friend is short of. I can't find that last buck either. How should I help him?