Celebrity Endorsement.

If a product or service is strategically designed and the customer feels delight after using that product or service and the if the experience is incomparable with the peer competitors than customer marries product/service.

To create and deliver a product/ service which is loved by the customer, the deliverable has to be unique, designed and developed keeping customer interest in mind and should be difficult to be copied/replicated by the competitors. If right strategies are followed for the product design and delivery then the brands can prevented themselves from turning to commodities.

There are lot many similar products (in hot drinks, electronics, sports gear etc), competing for the same customer segment, with there products being identical and compatible to each others in terms of price, quality and customer experiences. To distinguish themselves from there competitors they are forced to endorse celebrities for there marketing campaign as a result of which there final cost of product increases.

A close observation to the brand endorsement will revel that the celebrities keep on changing (take example of legendry golf player) based on the face value. It doesn’t really add much to the quality and deliverable of the product if “xyz” is brand ambassador for that and neither it is affected if “xyz” is replaced by the someone else.

The deliverable of company remains same and neither does it add any value to the customer by endorsing a specific celebrity.

One company (communication Industry) strategically entering into new mode of advertisement by using “zoozoo” (Dummy but live characters) for advertising its products and services. The benefit the company has in long term and short term are:

1. The company need not have to worry for endorsing celebrities as the character can be performed by anyone and everyone.


2. The advertisements are of low budget.


3. The advertisements are highly recognized and are to the target(delivering the message clearly).


4. No voice over effect is used, so dependency to a specific person voice is minimized.


5. Being low cost the company can by additional slots of the advertisement time.
   

You will also like to read Tiger Woods and the Coming Decline of Celebrity Endorsements

Networking sites

People get introduced to each other; know each other liking/disliking, hobbies, aspirations and interest and finally agreed to each other as partners.

You will ask what’s new about that. This is what generally happens before one prepares himself/ herself for any sort of partnership.

Well the new thing here is the platform through which people are getting introduced, yup you guess right I’m talking about the internet as a medium and networking sites as platform.

This is not a new buzz I’m sharing with you; even you might have some real examples in your friend’s circle of marriages and relationship happening over internet.

But the latest buzz is the euphoria created about the networking sites, I’ll not name the site but the fact is that everyone (corporate, individuals) are hooked for creating there profiles on such networking sites. I do not know the utility of creating buzz and making people follow you, but the fact is that the concept is getting accepted by people now a day.

The current offerings of social networks are imitations of things that are already available on the Internet, newsgroup, searches, chat, search colleague, friend, batch mates etc. I would like to share a survey report published on stockwatch.in. "Net working sites are the best way to reach out to friends and family, but such sites are costing the British businesses a loss of almost 1.38 billion pounds a year"

According to the survey, almost 50 per cent of the office staff is actively using these social networking sites for personal use during the office hours, which results in a waste of 40 minutes in one week. The IT services company who commissioned the survey, said the true cost to the economy could be substantially higher than the £1.38bn estimate.

I would also like to share An interesting fact with you; There are a lot of networking sites originated from India but none of them became so popular as compared to there western counterpart, may be they know how to Position there product, create branding of there product, how to pack it and how to hook people to use it.

Happy Networking......

Image source gtashuttleservices.com

Product Positioning

A newly launched advertisement of Dairy Milk chocolate, which says "Din hai suhana aaj pehli taarikh hai; meetha hai khana aaj pehli taarikh hai".

The question that comes in is how salary and Cadbury is related and how Cadbury and celebration are related. Well that;s what they are trying to relate; trying to position there brand and promote it as a sweet.

You might have came across many incidents where parents are shouting at their kids “don’t eat chocolate,” or you might have been asked; not to give chocolates to the kids.

Now if kids stop eating chocolate then who is going to consume them; Cadbury might have sensed it and to increase the penetration of their product they touched upon the sentiments and they positioned chocolates in a way that everyone can consume it and it’s no more a product that is to be consumed only by kids.

There use to be days when there use to be no salary account and the salary was distributing by the accounts department of the firm after signing some documents. People use to get there salary in cash and they use to carry sweets and gifts for there family member on the salary day.

With the advancement of technology; banking sector and penetration of so called corporate culture salary account came as a concept.

There advertisement indirectly gives you a message that “Buy Cadbury chocolates for your loved on your salary day”

The previous advertisement use to say “kuch metha ho gaye.”

Here the company might have planned to promote; replace sweets with a substitute (chocolate). We Indians have been exchanging, distributing sweets since centuries on good occasions, news etc and in case on unavailability of sweet at that point of time we never hesitate to use sugar as a substitute.

It’s all about how you position your product and how you market the product.