Thursday, May 31, 2007

Advertising for B-2-B

Branding through means of mass communication was something unheard for companies primarily in B-2-B transactions. Their limited and almost predefined customer base made it unsuitable and unworthy to resort to such exercise. Rather their advertising campaigns were limited to having stalls in ‘meets’, promotions at related conferences, ads in business magazines and pink dailies and direct mailing to selected potential customers. Nothing much has changed till date. However, suddenly there have been quite a few advertisements of some B-2-B transactional corporates. Though there aren’t pouring cats and dogs at the time, they are significant enough to indicate a trend, if not to reach a conclusion. Birla Group ads have been quite eminent across channels since last few months. Recently, Jaypee group and HCL are flooding the channels. (Though I personally find HCL’s adv. very unnerving. There is a thin line between self esteem and ego, and the commercial to a greater extent tends to be on the wrong side of the line ). L&T’s Imagineering campaign posters had occupied significant space in the print media and on hoarding in metro cities, though they haven’t raided the TV media after their highly emotional ‘ yeh mere papa ne banaya hai’ campaign. There are many other corporates who have resorted to such mass communication in the past one year. But in terms of creativeness, freshness of concept and subtly putting the message across, I think Accenture steals the show.

The core question for crore is then, why are companies involved in pure B-2-B transactions resorting to such full scale public advertising and that too through means of mass communication. Having worked on detailed financials of two major corporates purely in B-2-B transactions, I can safely assert that the proportion of advertising expenses to sales weren’t more than a quarter of a percent about a couple of years back. The same I assume would traditionally be the trend across all sectors and B-2-B companies. May be, the brand awakening and brand building is going to set things to change. However, such corporates aren’t much benefited by brand building if their ads are being viewed by non target customers. Their advertising and marketing campaigns were always deeply influenced by segmentation theory and would remain the same for years to come.

A closer look at the corporates meting out these ads would make you understand that almost all of this have a diverse customer base across sectors, and it would therefore not be absolutely out of place to use mass advertising as a tool to open up new potential customers. Though there are corporates purely in B-2-B transactions, which have thought otherwise. No means to know, whether they are more wise.

However, I feel the real reason lies somewhere else. A booming economy and a talent crunch have resorted corporates to vie for the available talent. A better branded company would find it easier to retain and attract people, other things (i.e. Location, salary, profile, company size) being same or equivalent. People would prefer working with say, Punj Lloyd (their adv. Stinks) than with Patel Engineering (nearly same sized companies). A brand name of a company also commands more loyalty from its employees.

A subordinate reason may be the effect a brand recognization of an organization has on its share price. (For its assumed that brand recognization leads to sustained monetary benefits in the long run). In the race to uphold shareholders’ wealth, several indirect measures are being resorted to ( and why not !) and addressing masses through advertising could be one of the motives.
Anyways, how successful this advertising campaigns have been would not be very discernible. So, just admire Tiger Woods forgetting to consider the rotation of ball(Accenture), enjoy the cuteness of the little boy impressing his baby 'girlfriend'. by operating the Hydro Plant(Jaypee) and helplessly watch the idiotic 'computer guy' talking crap till the innocous investment banker decides to buy out his firm (HCL). :)

Murdering English

Some brutal murders of the language I unfortunately discovered coming from different quarters in the past week.

A letter which self received from SBI started with ‘ Welcome to SBI. We are the only bank among 100 largest banks in the world’. But I didn’t took any offence as they are ready to give me a big loan at cheap rates without any collateral or guarantor. So, I’ll bank with the only bank among world’s 100 largest banks.

Ravi Shashtri coins out an entirely new meaning of ‘ Show no mercy. Take no prisoners’. (who says Indian coaches aren’t creative !). The temporal coach in his defence of using the above phrase said it means to defeat the opposition ‘fairly’ and ‘squarely’. Hmm...Dear Mr. Shashtri, you’re an f*king asshole and that means you have the sexiest butt on the planet. Last heard, Mr. Shastri’s English teacher tried to commit suicide.

A matrimonial advertisement posted by a prospective bride read – ‘I have just one sister married with a kid’. WTH…and I thought child marriages are passé and banned. I think I missed the chance when I was a kid. And read it again. ‘ …JUST ONE sister’. I think some people would be more comfortable writing in the regional languages though in English script, especially while posting matrimonial ads.

For further list, catch on Mr. Bush bullshiting on CNN. After completion(?) of his presidential term, he is planning to opt for a career change as a ‘stand-up’ comedian. He has all the skills needed for that. With his comic face and supreme knowledge on geography, I am sure the swagger 'gonna' be a big hit.

PS: Watching Miss Universe, especially the Q&A reinforced my conviction – ‘ Beauty and brains are diametrically opposite in location and proportions. All five final contestants had pre-prepared answers which were blurted out no matter what the question.

PSS : Any intelligent girl, I am sure, would not deem it worth to spend her precious time to contradict the above statement.

PSSS: How come I am looking so ugly today ?

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Ahmedabad

As the time to march towards Jharkhand dawns closer, I am lurking here in my hometown for the last few weeks. Being a forced nomadic and having trot unfathomable places interacting and negotiating with human look-alikes for almost half a decade, I am really confounded as I enjoy uninterrupted full week at home. Agar duniya mein kahin jannat hai, to woh yahi hai, yahi hai, yahi hai. However, absences of some cool sexy apsaras in this jannat is slightly disturbing.

With no flurry of business calls, no official mails, no issues as important as the ‘existence of world’ depending only on me, no non-standard verbal creativeness of customers to be borne every morning, no alarm clocks bothering me (did they ever..?), I have decided to catch up on my lost sleep.( okie, that means I sleep seven hours a day…...alone ofcourse ) My reading inclination seems to have deserted me, and has been replaced by my nonchalant gazes at the idiot box. Seems I am as free as one can be, the word ‘free’ in literary sense. But I think, my honeymoon is going to end soon. Nope, u f*king crap, ‘Honeymoon’ not in literary sense. Samjha kar yaar. I am been assigned the highly tortuous task of cleaning up (or down..watever) my closet which boasts of hoarding more books than LDCE’s library. No ideas please. Not your type of books. Pure academic books, idiot. I think I can start a library if I don’t land up in a decent job.( Till now, I did decent job only. I meant the fat paychecks). And yaa, the list of items to be purchased, ( why do people call it ‘shopping’ ?) seems to be getting as long as Jacob Oram. Considering my super disinclination for purchasing (buddhu, bole to ‘shopping’), even a Tatenda Taibu would have suffice. Has anyone ever outsourced shopping out ? Help..!!..Help..!!

About Me

Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Just another management graduate