Your Mama Is So Ugly, She Will Make An Onion Cry!!!

This ad caught my eye for the fact that it goes back to that age old way of abusing the other person: saying things about one's mother. Growing up, I remember learning tonnes of swear words which started either from "Maa" or "Madar". Less gross but more incendiary stuff involved permanently casting some one's mom into some role....case in point, we started telling a batch mate at IIT that her mom was probably Miss. India...seems pretty innocuous but soon made the guy completely mad...and he still gets mad on this invocation!!! Even a female friend recently used that age old simplistic swear phrase which calls for the unity of your mother and sister!!!

So coming back to the ad, it seems that invoking one's Mama has the same shock value even in US. And really, in a crowded market of energy drinks with competing brands like Red Bull, you have to try everything to get your voice heard. So Pepsi decides to use the perfect combo: Two sportsmen, a high energy sport like Ice Hockey( by the way, Amp is also painted all over the car of Dale Earnhardt Jr. in NASCAR, the other big heartland sport in US)and a lot of back and forth using Mama....seems like a very effective combination!!!

Making Sense Of Prostitution

This is an interesting topic and I would restrict myself to discussing the marketing aspects of the situation rather than the lurid details of the escort service which the governor of New York used.

The Emperors Club VIP is a high end prostitution ring which it now seems that Eliot Spitzer had been using for as many as 10 years. The now defunct site rated its girls on a scale of 1 to 7 diamonds. Hourly rate for a girl with 7 or less diamond rating could be around $1000/hour and those for above 7 could be as much as $5000/hour. Now the interesting situation arising out of this tiered pricing is that the same girl could be Kirsten charging $1000/night and Tiffany charging $5000/night.

Now lets look at the marketing aspects of this situation and try to generalize it beyond the business of prostitution.This ability to sell the same product at different prices based on consumer's willingness to pay is a marketer's dream. In case of prostitution, the job is made comparatively easy because of lack of information through which you can compare product/service offered as well as the inherent esoteric nature of product/service. Compare this to trying to sell cars. Toyota for long has grappled with the problem that consumers think that Lexus is a beefed up Toyota and if they really have money to spend, they would buy a Merck or a BMW rather than Lexus. Obviously having Lexus as a different brand for luxury, more expensive cars helps and in some ways tries to do the kind of rating that happens in The Emperors Club but the problem is too obvious. There are tons of people who cover cars on specific aspects, come out with ratings and do a killer job on comparing one model with the other. The girls in the prostitution ring do not have to go through this gruelling free market scrutiny.

Now price has been historically used to communicate better quality. It seems obvious what better quality would mean in escort services. How about cars? Quality has traditionally meant power. European brands have been historically considered high on the power vector. Japanese companies have tried to push the envelope on the reliability scale but I have always believed that you cannot compensate for awesome power with awesome reliability. As Kate Walsh would say in the now famous Cadillac ad:" The real question is: When you turn the car on, does it return the favor?"
I want to draw a comparison with the escort situation but for the sake of sanity, I will leave it at that.

What could be other ways of doing an efficient tiered pricing? Place your product in more exclusive channels. In case of this service, the channel was Internet and not the run of the mill shady pimps on dark streets.In case of cars, you really cannot afford to push a Lexus and a Toyota from the same dealership and not end up doing damage to your ability to charge extra money for Lexus.
Cosmetic companies traditionally do a great job in creating different brands based on pricing and channel management....think about Garnier and L'Oreal. But frankly, it would be a marketer's dream to be able to generate the kind of information asymmetry which exists in case of escort services....not sure if this marketer would like to claim this fact on his resume but I am damn sure, he will be a hell of a proud man to be able to accomplish it.

The Obsession With Processes!!!

I visited Intel's plant in Shanghai in 2006 as part of the business school curriculum. While there were a lot of interesting things that I observed, one thing clearly stood out( and I am happy that I took a picture of it).

So I excuse myself to take a leak and come across this thing staring at me. Gone are the days when you expected all the neat graffiti from the previous contributor to the urinal. It is all about imparting learning and making your employees better...even helping them out with some leaking etiquette grounded in high school physics on trajectories!!

Intel is known for a very pervasive process control around the world and I am pretty sure that this picture exists in a lot of its plants around the world.One thing that I am wondering is that do people really get an opportunity to wet their feet? I though even in developing countries, every one came to work in some footwear!!!

Networking On An Airplane!!!

Life keeps throwing up interesting surprises and this one is the latest. I met this guy on a flight from Dallas 5 months back. He was CFO of a company called SkyGolf, maker of GPS equipment used by professionals on golf courses around the world. In its space, the products produced by this company are the best in class. We start talking and he told me how he built this company from scratch in Mississippi with a couple of his friends. Revenues exceeded 250 million dollars and market valuation was more than a billion dollars. More importantly, they were able to keep all the equity between the partners in a very capital intensive business. Company was an obviously attractive target for firms like Garmin and things could not have been better.

So this person, Mahalingam Shrinivas, gave me his business card and we promised to keep in touch. Interestingly, his business card did not have his email address or the phone number. None the less, I thought he would be a great speaker for the entrepreneurship club at the business school. From that day on, we bumped into each other again once of the airport and another time at a restaurant in LA.

Well, I was flipping through my business cards yesterday and I came across Shrinivas' card and I thought I will try to find his email address on the web. I have been promising myself that I will send an email to him but somehow it never happened. So I start searching for him and then comes the shocker. On January 19th, Shrinivas was arrested by law enforcement agencies for embezzling more than 2 million dollars using his position as CFO of SkyGolf. He is now spending time in Madison County jail waiting for the verdict!!! Maximum sentence could be as much as 15 years.Check out the link: http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080119/NEWS/801190341

I am wondering what is the probability of meeting a crook like this on a flight!!! And no wonder, I don't need his email address anymore. So much for networking in business classes on an airplane..

Learning Business from Kate Walsh!!

Kate Walsh recently did an advertisement for Cadillac CTS in which she says something which goes like this:
"In today's luxury game, the question is not whether your car has available features like 40 GB hard drive..pop up nav screens or any other little things...the real question is: When you turn the car on, does it return the favor?"

When you turn the car on, does it return the favor!!!

I must have seen this ad tons of times in recent days and I don't think anything captures business reality of modern day world better than this. The fact of the matter is that things which you thought were super hi-tech yesterday are becoming a commodity today. Think about Intel and how the core memory business they were in got commoditized in the flash of an eye. What about Apple's products? Electronics is flush with examples of commoditization. Manufacturing for normal conventional goods is already a commodity activity. Don't Google and Cisco shell out commodities? Aren't airplanes commodities? And aren't cars commodities?

It is a matter of time, or I think it has already happened to some extent, that a basic level of human brain could also be thought to be a commodity. If your kid dropped out after high school and he learnt math as per what his teacher taught and nothing beyond, your kid might be a commodity produced by the school mass production system( at least for someone who is looking to hire for math skills)

So in this age of pervasive commoditization, where is the hope?

Let us go back to the car example. Mercedes Benz has gone through some massive onslaught in last two years for its poor quality. JD Power hammered it consistently. None the less, that star in front of the car still has its shine amongst all of us who grew up thinking of owning a Benz one day. The brand had such strong image and such strong desirability that the shine of the star has withstood the quality problems. Sales haven't plummeted the way they would have for a lesser known brand. So one way to escape the vicious magnet of commoditization in car industry is to develop a brand. There could be other ways as well.

So when Kate Walsh says:"The real question is: When you turn the car on, does it return the favor?", she is so right. All the luxury that you get in a car is commodity....it doesn't really turn you on. A Honda can have everything that is there in a Benz but it will never be a Benz....and for sure, you will never feel that IT RETURNED THE FAVOR!!!

Getting Robbed for calling Customer Care: Doing Business the SPRINT way

I just had a wonderful experience with SPRINT. I am finally getting close to the robbery that has happened to me in the last two years for the cell phone contract I have. In US, cell phone services are already very expensive and on top of that, I had to pay extra money to get a cell phone because I was an international student( and didn't have a SSN at that time). So my plan was...54 dollars/month for 300 minutes and no SMS messages( and I would pay if someone sent a message to me!!!). They also took a 125 dollar deposit for a year for not having a Social Security Number....and by the way, the phone is the worst piece of junk you can get anywhere in the world.

Well, the day I had been waiting for was finally arriving. I was ready to say Bye Bye to Sprint as soon as my 2 year contract got over. So I called up today, 4 days before the final date and told the first person who picked up in Customer Care that I wanted to cancel my contract and want some information about it. He said, let me transfer you to someone. So I said OK and then I wait for 15 minutes before someone comes online. And then this woman first talks to me in a weird way and then tells me that the contract would expire on 29th August and not 29th July. I am getting pissed for the way she is shouting at me. She kept insisting that 29th August was the final date of the contract and that I need to get my facts right...well, I DID!!

So I hang up and call again telling this time that I wanted to renew my contract. I get transferred in not more than 10 seconds and I am told that my contract would expire on 29th July!!

I have had really bad customer service experiences in the past but majority of them were probably because representatives were not trained properly. In this case, I am reasonably sure that the response of the woman to tell me a wrong expiration date was a decision which came from the top. So the rule behind the script would have been something like this:
1) If the contract is going to expire soon( some days might be specified here...probably 5 or 10) and person calls up to tell that he would not renew it, tell him to wait for the next representative.
2) Make him wait for at least 15 minutes.
3) If he is still on the phone, talk to him and tell him a wrong delayed expiration date.

I think the script went wrong when the woman got angry for my prodding. Really, if you have to fool someone, you have to be really cool about it.And if you have to super fool someone then you have to be supercool about it!!

More importantly, my point is this: My guess is that Sprint would have at least 60 million customers in US. Assuming a very conservative churn rate of 10% a year, you have 6 million customers leaving every year, which is 500,000 customers a month. If 5,000 of these customers get fooled by what just happened with average monthly bill of 30 dollars, that's 150,000 dollars added to the top line per month...

By the way, I have the Federal Communication Commission(FCC) number (1-888-225-5322)where I am going to call and complain about this. I hope my call was recorded( of course for quality control purposes!!) and I hope this malpractice comes out in open. For some reason, I am very certain that it was not an innocent mistake on the part of the harmless, and otherwise benign, call center rep.

Indian Accent: Pride & Prejudice

Someone had an interesting observation recently. He thought that Indians have a bigger accent problem than Chinese because we are too proud about our ability to speak English....proud to the extent that we really don't like to work on the accent that we have. English in Indian accent has become an object of regular humor in media around the world since call centers started opening up in India. Purely from the perspective of call center industry, accent continues to remain an irritant in an otherwise runaway success story. As an Indian, I am proud of the fact that I have been speaking English for close to 15 years. I don't make grammatical mistakes and when someone observes that I speak good English, I am quick to point out that English is kind of native language to me. Some kind of an ego play is at work when I tell people about my English speaking capability.

Chinese, on the other hand, are starting from a clean slate. And they do not have the ego which us Indians have about our English speaking capabilities. So when you talk to Chinese the grammar might be missing, the vocabulary might not be rich but the accent is definitely not there. And we all know that Chinese government is pushing English in a big way in China at the primary school level. Talk to people on the streets of Shanghai and you would know that something is happening. Purely from the perspective of the call center industry, the next generation of Chinese will surely pose a big challenge to the existing Indian forte.

Pimp My Ride: Hope of Deliverance

I am watching this program called Pimp My Ride on VH1 and believe me, this thing is awesome. Rap star Xzibit is the anchor and in every episode, he "pimps" up a car. No wonder, the lucky owner is absolutely ecstatic. So when you see Xzibit standing at your door, your know that your car is ready to get new rim, tons of chrome, a super sanzzy look and loads of other stuff. Majority of the renovation conform to the ethos of gangsta rap but none the less, the final product is astounding.

So in this episode, it was Josh's turn. His 1988 Accord Legend was ready to become legendary and it did become one. Though it takes good amount of money to renovate a completely trashed car, I am sure the price for the content produced is still very little. It also makes for great viewing. The content also caters to the inherent desire we all have to get a big surprise out of nowhere.
For Josh if God had a face, it would somewhat look like that of Xzibit. Whoever said, or believes, that God is dead should think twice because Xzibit might be knocking on your door tomorrow.

Innovation On A Beer Bottle!!

When you look at a bottle of beer, it is very easy to think that there is hardly any scope for something different in either the beer inside the bottle or the bottle itself. You would think that mantra for a beer company is simple--pour money into advertising to keep yourself visible to the customer and then keep dishing the same beer again and again.Not any more..I was watching this advertisement for Coors Light and was fascinated by the new bottle they are coming out with. The latest Coors Light bottle(which they call Cold Activated Bottle) features mountains on the bottle package that turn blue when the bottle has been chilled to the perfect temperature!! Isn't it awesome?

This packaging innovation is great from two perspectives: a) The benefits of this new feature can be communicated very easily and b) Customers would know from the very first time when they drink Coors Light what this new feature on the bottle means. the company says that the Cold Activated Bottle will be available on all 12-ounce Coors Light and Coors bottles at participating bars, restaurants, grocery, convenience stores and liquor stores this May. And really, the simplicity and some sort of "aha effect" when you see those mountains turn blue make it a marketer's dream.

The Sin City Pilgrimage: Money & Ritualized Consumption

My first trip to Vegas just finished and I am ready to share my experiences. For some people, whatever happens in Vegas need not remain in Vegas!!

First,to say the least, it was an interesting experience. First thing that struck me was the fact that majority of the people sitting at the slot machines were old people. Imagine what must be going in the head of the Grand Pa when he is pulling those levers at 4 in the morning. I tried to understand this phenomenon but I am not sure I understand it fully. Some of my friends say that you lose the least amount of money and kill the maximum time on a slot machine. So for all these people, it is a way to kill time. But what about the interesting desire of hitting the jackpot every time you push a quarter in. And what about not hitting it almost every time!!
I observed some of these people and I am not sure if they looked very happy for killing time. Did I just stumble upon the reason why majority of people in this country are not happy with what they have?

Well, I spend 3 hours on the black jack table, lose money and then come back to the hotel. Next evening, we catch a taxi to go to the Monte Carlo Hotel where everyone is planning to meet...and guess which song is playing in the cab?

Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay and you're okay
Money it's a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I'll buy me a football team

I ask the driver to increase the volume and he asks me:"Can any other song be more appropriate in Vegas?"

The other fascinating thing about Vegas is the whole idea of ritualized consumption. Its as if people have to visit this place every 2 months or whatever and pay their dues in return for the sins..a pilgrimage to the Sin City? For some of my friends, these rituals mean 6 hours a day on the poker table, drinks and visit to the clubs. And it is very ritualistic. Ask someone who has been to Vegas frequently and he will tell you the time he wakes up in Vegas, what breakfast he eats, which places he gambles, which bars he goes to and you will soon know that for them it has a certain routine/ritual to it. Think about Super Bowl every year and what people do a night before it. Chips & Dips, Beer and asking friends to come over to watch the game on a big screen. Think of Thanksgiving & turkey, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. And then think of Halloween. All have a healthy component of ritualized consumption and Vegas is no different. The gambling industry there survives on this mindset where people want to get away every now and then from their normal lives and indulge in things that would not be possible otherwise. From a purely marketing perspective, if you can make the consumption a ritual, there is no limit to what you can do...

Money get back
I'm alright Jack keep your hands off my stack.
Money it's a hit
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit
I'm in the hi-fidelity first class travelling set
n I think I need a Lear jet