Yes, the World.

green marketing – can we only plant trees?

PrimeGreen is perhaps one of the only Indian agencies to offer ‘green solutions’ to its clients. They do some amazing work in solar powered hoardings.

But when it comes to brand equity, it needn’t be all about planting trees and saving energy. You could go ahead and save something totally cooler that links better with your brand and makes it endearing.

HaagenDazs did just that. They decided that they’d like to save the bees. Like ‘The Happening’ tells us, there’d be no world (no fruits, no flowers, no nothing) if the bees died.

Haagendazs decided to save the bees that are responsible for the natural flavours of their ice creams. And ofcourse they used the ‘cute potential’ to the max.
Help the Honey Bees is a cool initiative by Haagendazs and you get to learn how to save the bees an even create your own bee self.
The site is cute and sweetly done. And once you create your own bee self you’ll love the little stripey creatures so much that you’ll swear to save them.

Stuff to remember when marketing the green:

1. Choose a cause that is linked to your brand/product
People need to remember your brand. That’s really why you’re doing it. And if your cause and brand are headed in different directions, chances are people will remember the cause and ignore the brand (shudder). Haagendazs chose a cause that was closely linked (or they linked it anyway) to their product.

2. Choose a cool cause
Everyone is saving the trees, the forests, women, children. Pick a cause that won’t be lost in the crowd. And trust me, there still are many very important causes left in this miserable world.

3. Don’t let the cause overtake your brand
Every time you read about the bee, the site reminded you that the bees were responsible (not for nature) but for Haagendazs lovely natural flavours.

My take-aways as a site visitor
1. Bees are cute. and they’re important. I’d like to save ‘em.
2. Haagendazs uses natural fruit.
3. Haagendazs is classy and cool.

PS: This is the bee-me.

Create your own and off you go! Wheeee! I mean Buzzzzzzzzzz.

you’re not being served, because i haven’t a clue how

Hi

I am planning a trip to Egypt this winter.
I couldn’t find the prices for your Egypt tour on your website.
Could you please mail me some details.

Thank you
Rita Keeling
(UK)

______________________________________________________

Dear Rita

Thank you for your mail.
Please visit our website for information.
www.ihaventaclueaboutcustomerservice.com

Warm regards
Big Brand Pvt Ltd

2 lives left

Okay so I’m dead serious about this. As I inch closer to turning 25 (okay so it’s still 6 months away) I don’t think I realize that quite a bit of my years on earth are done with.

Call me crazy but I think somewhere deep down I believe this is my first shot, and next time I’ll do better.

And no I don’t believe in reincarnation. And my religious inclination towards Sikhism has more to do with a sense of community than anything else.

I think too much gaming did me in.

Duke Nukem and God of War. You screwed me in the head. Now I think my life’s a practise session.

And my screen says I’ve got 2 lives left.

the picture with a story

I saw a Raghu Rai exhibition today and I just don’t know how he does it. Each of his photographs has a story of its own. One could probably write a book about each one.

I had only just taken out my camera to click the marine drive and was adjusting the zoom and focus just to check; and I heard a woman by the roadside hurl the choicest abuses at me.
(I know they were choicest because I’ve heard my college batchmates use them to describe very serious situations.)

She had assumed that someone had come by to click a picture of the misery that was her street-life (she failed to note the skyward direction of my lens).

I did what anybody who hates confrontation would do. I ignored her. Pretended to not hear her.

It helps that I haven’t a clue what these abuses actually mean. This allows me to maintain my cool and look distracted and lost in whatever I’m doing. (I’m very good at that)

Ofcourse my planner of a mind started to think of possible outcomes
..Would she get up and try and harm my camera?
..Would she hurl abuses that I knew the meanings of? (unlikely, they’d be too mild)
..Would other people support her?

I decided that a click of a building in the distance might prove my decent intentions, and this picture was born.

It’s hardly a picture… but now at least it has a story

twinning!

To state the cliche yet again – man is a social animal.
While the digital medium allows for easy sharing and networking, in the offline world it seems to put people in silos.

The mp3 player or the mobile phone allowed people to keep to themselves (which they often wanted) and yet be entertained (which hadn’t happened since books).

Ever since we came up with the earphone (not the headphone), people discovered a way to share what is essentially an individual sport. I call this ‘twinning’.

Twinning: The act of sharing an ear phone with another person so that you can share content.

For youngsters in crowded places, it’s the perfect ‘personal hangout’. Sharing music, videos and chit-chatting, it provides the ultimate in personal social networking in a crowded place.

Increasingly friends are seen giggling at a video, humming a tune in unison with an ear phone plugged in one ear.

So it’s true, you can give people the digital ‘individual’ space, but at some point they’re going to want to share that too; perhaps as a sign of their friendship, their boredom at being on their own, their courtesy towards a friend who isn’t carrying her mp3 player, or just as the ‘provider’ or entertainment that makes one ever-popular. Who knows!

There’s something to this twinning, which quite interests me. For the life of me, I just can’t seem to put my finger on it.

social-life-killer I am not!

Too many articles and opinions have been doing the rounds about how online social networking is killing real life relationships.

Sure, people are spending a lot of time scrapping each other or hanging-out on gtalk, but that’s hardly enough reason to bad-mouth the net as a ‘social-life killer’.

With e-networking I can have a word with Bill Gates if I like, so what if I haven’t a clue about my neighbour.

How can this kill your social skills when all it’s doing is giving wings to those who never had any? It’s letting me say hello and wish people on their birthdays when otherwise I probably wouldn’t bother.

Yes MMOGs and heavy gaming is killing people’s ability to interact and relate with other human beings. But that’s hardly digital’s fault. Isn’t it the same with any form of addiction? Doesn’t it consume you, especially if it’s an addiction that only involves the individual and not the entire community.

In fact, even if people are becoming more and more withdrawn, they are finding relationships in a different dimension. Why, only some time back a woman tried to attempt suicide and was saved by a joint effort by her online group to locate her.

With busy-bee lives, old-world socializing is dying. No need to see red. Change is inevitable.

Online Social networking isn’t all that bad.

God knows, without it I’d be living in my head and talking to myself!

Netnography – i know you now

Newer worlds are being explored fearlessly in the digital domain and newer terms are being born at lightening speed.

Our experiment, ’72 hours in Second Life’ in which some planners immersed themselves in the virtual lives of Second Life residents, is apparently ‘netnography‘. (thank you, Prof Falguni)

‘Djinn Saphir’, my avatar pranced about Second Life, wore fancy denims, carried Gucci bags, and bought coke for a L$ all in the hope of understanding Second Life and it’s residents.

Now at least I can justify my paycheck. I wasn’t prancing about Second Life, I was performing (doing/practising?) Netnography.

if you’re marketing, you’re dead

We all realize that the digital space is about engaging people and having a conversation with them.

One-way marketing messages mean you’ll rot in digital hell. (which isn’t any better than the real hell, what with the distinction between the real and the virtual blurring)

While trying to promote a website for diabetic kids (chidia.com) I ended up plastering orkut and facebook and created a page for the lovable little chirpy that was the mascot.

I had committed the dreaded M word. Marketing. I tried to post mention of the public-service-site in as many forums as possible without giving any thought to the existing conversations on the forums.

Why the digital space is tough on marketers
1. It takes too much time and patience to be a part of the hundreds of conversations online!
2. Poor things, they confuse digital and broadcast all the time. Marketers have been broadcasting messages forever and it’s not easy to suddenly have to have a ‘dialogue’ with consumers, who historically were supposed to just shut up and listen.

It’s so easy as marketers to just advertise. I shouldv’e known it wouldn’t work. I mean, if I was having a conversation with my friends and an idiot of a marketer jumped in, mouthed a jingle or a message and ran away, I think I’d be pretty pissed.

So, here’s to having more conversations about chidia.com and lesser social-network-bombarding.

i no speaka da english

1. you didnt understand a thing
2. you don’t know about the fuel crisis
3. you think sonal has a shitty sense of humour (hmph)

Language just evolves so much. I remember when during my teenage ‘move it’ and ‘cool it’ were very popular terms though I was never sure what the ‘it’ was. I even recall telling a cow to ‘move it’ as it struggled past our car, leaving me with an LOLing family and a rather bewildered cow that went WTF!

when digital should shut up and watch some TV

I don’t know about you, but the TV has given me many great memories. The most important thing that TV advertising has given me (yes it has given me something) are the fun jingles.

Okay so i’m no TV-geek but I find myself singing old jingles that formed a part of my childhood. Remember Nerolac?
Jab ghar ki raunak badhani ho..
deewaron ko jab sajana ho…
Nerolac! Nerolac!

Maybe these are early days, but digital really isn’t ‘making memories’. It’s making links, forwards and all that, but that collective memory is missing.

Sure I may say, ‘seen that forward?! No??’ and then quickly look through my mail to find it and show it to you. But it’s really not that same.

I think it’s the lack of use of music and other content that can be viralled by ‘mouth’. No, WOM as in digital buzz is not same as it actually being viralled by ‘mouth’

So give it up for ‘Doodh doodh doodh doodh, piyo glassful… doodh!’

While I love the digital space, I think sometimes when the TV scores over it, we digitophiles should shut up and listen. TV’s not all that out the window just yet.

PS: I know you sang the nerolac jingle when you read this :p