Volkswagen hails itself as an Auto MNC which has garnered a reputation for being an innovative brand, by relying on innovative marketing practices. After making an entry to the Indian market in 2007, the company kicked off its innovative marketing in the country in 2010, in a bid to improve its brand awareness with the ‘talking newspaper’ campaign for the then newly launched Volkswagen Vento sedan. On the 21st of September, readers of ‘Times of India’ in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Pune and Chennai were taken by surprise when their newspapers ‘talked’ to them about the Vento. This first ever advertising campaign of its kind in the world was achieved using an i-pod sized device embedded with a chip, a speaker and batteries to last for
Branding Archive
As the media likes to call it India’s answer to Amazon.com, Flipkart is India’s first Indian Online venture valued a billion dollars. While much is said about India being a service oriented, rather than product oriented country, several e-commerce startups have emerged over the last couple of years to prove that India can also nurture Internet companies which can compete with companies in the Silicon Valley. One such startup is Flipkart.com (Shall we call it a startup?) Founded by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (not related to each other) in Oct 2007, flipkart is today a book lovers’ paradise. The two IIT graduates who had Amazon experience wanted to start a good online book selling store for the country. With expected revenues of Rs. 75 Crores
Today an average supermarket contains 290 types of cookies, 195 types of soups, 115 salad dressings, and thousands of other product offerings. This means that advertisers have to work very hard in order to grab the attention of their consumers. More than $300 billion are spent on advertising each year, with figures growing exponentially. To separate the best from the rest, advertisers have started using a special type of marketing known as subliminal marketing. It is a technique of exposing the consumers to pictures of the product, brand names, or other such marketing stimuli without the consumers being consciously aware. Once the customers are exposed to a subliminal marketing stimulus, the brain of the customer is believed to decode the information by itself and act
Imagine A bowl full of maggi noodles in your hands!!! Nothing more delicious than that seems when you are feeling hungry. Few days back when I was eating maggi, a thought puzzled my mind that how an Indian consumer can be so mad for maggi, which was not at all according to the Indian food habits. Maggi – A product of Nestle Maggi was introduced in India in 1982. Nestle launched Maggi as ‘2 mins. Noodle’, when Indian market was devoid of such packaged food items. Maggi was launched with a concept of instant cooked food item for working women. They promoted it with a slogan ‘ Bas 2 Min.’ – “ Fast to Cook & Good to Eat” . It was in an attractive
It is not too often that a BMW marketing campaign goes unnoticed – Why is it so? What differentiates BMW marketing from the rest? How do they stay ahead of the fierce competition from the likes of Audi and Mercedes? It would seem that BMW’s marketing team has made a conscious decision to keep trying radical and (often) controversial means to stay ahead of the competition. Let’s look at some of BMW’s more radical approaches to marketing: The Greek Used car Ad: Behind this advertisement was a marketing ‘fact’ that everybody knows – Sex sells! But, who would have ever thought that a used automobile could be sexy! This advertisement for pre-owned BMW’s was at the receiving end of criticism for the blatant sexual innuendo
Indian TV is buzzing with the jingle ‘Hum mein hai Hero!’ It reminds me of a similar re-branding exercise taken up by ‘Hamara Bajaj’ in the year 2001. “Badal rahe hain hum yahaan. Yeh zameen yeh aasmaan… Naye bharat ki nayi tasveer. Buland Bharat ki buland tasveer… Hamara Bajaj.” In a country, where two-wheeler account for 80 percent of all vehicles on the road, market leadership is a tough fight between local manufacturers and foreign entrants. Through this commercial, Bajaj has kept its leadership role with advertising and marketing that pays homage to its roots in Indian society, while mixing it with modernity. In a marketplace that up until 2005 still referred to all motorcycles in the country as ‘Hondas,’ this positioning has literally transformed Bajaj