New Year Wishes!

This is my last post for 2008! 2008 was an year of :-) :-( :-) :-( for me, with some of my biggest achievements and some of my biggest losses experienced this year. And out of all the things lost, I really miss one of my closest friends whom I lost in an accident in May’08. Don’t know why but can’t stop myself from remembering him continuously since last 3-4 days esp. when I am thinking of how 2008 was for me! Hope 2009 is all :-) :-) :-) :-) for me.

Wish all my friends and blog readers a very happy and prosperous new year!

Here’s to the outgoing year, 2008:

May the good times live on in our memories,

and may we learn lessons from the troubling times

that will make us stronger and better than ever.

Here’s to 2009:

For each and every one of you,

may it be filled with significant steps

toward the fulfillment of your fondest wishes.

- By Joanna Fuchs

Kingfisher Communication

I’m sure like me all of you would also have got your inboxes flooded with new year wishes. More than personal messages, it’s in fact all sorts of marketing campaigns from different services wishing new year and announcing some or other new year offer. Ah speak of that over-abuse of email marketing channel in India!!! Read More At Marketing Chit-Chat...

Ghajini Marketing Contd…

I had earlier written about some interesting Ghajini marketing strategies and a spoof on Ghajini, but got to notice some other interesting stuffs about Ghajini on digital medium in last one week and from whatever I have observed, one thing is clear that their marketing agency has definitely tried quite some different online marketing strategies for promoting this movie. Read More At Marketing Chit-Chat...

Gajodhar: New viral campaign

Got a mailer from Makemytrip with subject - Worldwide premier of Gajodhar…before time! The first look itself gave a very clear impression that it is some spoof on much-awaited movie Ghajini. Watched the film and found it to be funny! Read More At Marketing Chit-Chat...

The importance of being Earnest!

When we got this insert in landmark about a play of Oscar Wilde in Bangalore, we got damn excited as both me and N enjoy watching plays and we used to watch lots of them when we were in Mumbai but somehow we never got much chance to watch good plays in Bangalore. Either we were not aware of exact schedules of plays or even when we came to know about some, we were not quite sure of the booking procedures and all. This time however the insert explained it all and most importantly it was a very famous comedy of Wilde titled “The importance of being Earnest” and tickets were easily available online. There was only one small hitch, we were not aware of this place known as Chowdiah Memorial Hall in Malleshwaram where this play was being performed. Well, that’s a very famous place in Bangalore but neither me nor N is very familiar with that part of the town. But after some basic google map surfing and with some help from one of our friends, we finally reached the place. Though the area was quite ok but reaching that hall was not an easy task as one needs to cross through many small curvy lanes, in fact at one point of time we were wondering what kind of place is this which is in so interior! But I’m happy that we were wrong, it’s actually a very beautiful hall with a violin shape exterior.

This play was being organized by Evam group and yesterday being Christmas, they had made the overall venue also look quite festive. Some interesting stalls and one small game corner! And after roaming out here and there for a while finally we settled for the show at 7:30…the banner of the show read, “A serious comedy for serious people” :-) and oh how much right that sentence was! The play was really hilarious. Set in an old Brit setting, this play is about a gentleman named Jack and the whole fiasco about his name being / not being Earnest! Oh what a wonderful performance by all the actors and what a script! We kept on laughing throughout those 2 hours. We enjoyed it totally and we would recommend this play to everybody who are interested in theater and some light moments. I must say I was quite impressed with Evam team, though I do have very small suggestion for them, after ending the play it would have been good if they would have introduced us to the cast on stage. The whole cast did appear in the end but viewers like us who were watching Evam performance for the first time were not knowing the name of individual actors. But overall it was a time very well spent and reminded us of our courtship days when we used to go to Prithvi in Juhu :-). Now I’ll be surely looking forward to their next performance in Bangalore.

IDEA - for the people, by the people!

Well, personally I have always liked the advertisements of idea esp. the television commercials. Though the ideas shown in the commercials are not always practical or implementable one but then too those commercials leave a sweet smile on your face with a thought, “oh how wonderful it would have been if this idea was implementable”. For e.g., that school kids of village learning through phone or the village kid giving the road direction to a gentleman in a very fluent English. Yes, some of the commercials show those ideas which if possible to implement could have really changed lives. So, considering my liking for Idea ads, it was quite natural for me to click this very prominent online Idea ad and to my pleasant surprise ... Read More At Marketing Chit-Chat

Fresh Look!

Well, changing my blog look was on my agenda since long but after losing my personal template code last week, now I a neither have the time nor the enthu to write another template code for myself. It’s hell lot of work and needs some dedicated time which I don’t have as of now! Even weekends are damn busy these days and hence I decided to go ahead with this standard extra column template. Though I have done bit of customizations in terms of images and columns but most of it is from the standard layout. I personally like 2 sidebar designs just like my wordpress blog and so went ahead with changing the old blogger template to this. It needs some more work but will do those customizations as and when I will get time, till then at least there is a fresh look on my blog :-)

Ghajini Marketing: Employees go bald!

While I was anyways impressed with these interesting collaterals of Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi in multiplexes, I get to hear of this another very different kind of promotion campaign of Aamir Khan’s upcoming movie Ghajini. Read More At Marketing Chit-Chat...

Remembering Murphy’s Law

Ah as if all the recent incidents were not enough that this had to happen! Can anything be worse than office laptop getting crashed as soon as you are back from an official tour and you are supposed to finish off whole lot of pending stuffs??? Yes, suddenly my laptop decided to take a rest and very conveniently it displayed the message “ hard disk error, attribute code : 05” and after this you do anything its just not re-booting. Well, looks like luck is favoring me toooooooo much for past few weeks :-(.
I rushed to my admin guy and he again very conveniently replied, “don’t worry since it’s a new one it’s still under warranty and they will replace the hard disc”. “REPLACE! But about my data?” Another frustrating reply, “we will try to retrieve D drive but C is gone”!!!!!
Now I really don’t know how to react? This was a new laptop with high-end configuration given to me only few weeks back and since I had recently migrated all my stuffs to this new laptop so I have not even kept any back-up of the files anywhere. Considering the brand and configuration I never expected this to happen so soon! How will I manage my work without any file??????? Apart from all my office data of past 2 years, my favorite songs and some snaps recently downloaded from my camera, it also had some of my very important personal stuffs like snaps of my paintings which are hard to get back as I have given away most of my paintings to my friends and acquaintances :-(….So, all of those are gone! This realization is too upsetting and disturbing. I am feeling damn irritated and hopelessly thinking of Mr. Murphy who one fine day said, “when things have to go wrong, they will”. Were they actually having me in mind while devising laws like – “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong” or “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time, in the worst possible way”!!!

Update: Well got the news from admin guy who was working on recovering files…I lost all my C drive, parts of D drive and but obviously all my desktop files and I had this bad habit of storing all my recent files which I need for immediate reference on my desktop :-(. And no it was not some virus attack, it was manufacturer’s defect because of which it happened. And losing desktop files also mean losing the new template code which I had managed to write with my novice html skills…I got this great idea of not using some ready template and having a totally customized template for my blog as my current template does give some problem in mozilla and so I had taken the pain of coding down a new template on my own! And I am not a techie, so you can imagine the pain and effort which I would have taken to write a code on my own! I was waiting for one free weekend when I could manage time to implement that code and here we go…that code is gone! Now I can think of why the hell I didn’t store that template code file in my D drive but no right now I can only think of MURPHY’s LAW!!! Somehow this law seems to close to my heart now :-(

Recession and Consumer Spending Behavior

A lot is discussed now-a-days about India being geared up for economic downturn and consumer spending not observing any major shift as compared to its earlier pattern. Well, to some extent it’s true and being a marketer myself I understand that one needs to be optimistic about the market and consumer purchasing power but when I think of myself as a consumer I do feel that my spending behavior has undergone some major changes in last 3-4 months. Call it the effect of this phrase “onset of downturn” or the effect of phrase “save cash for those bad times” I have definitely changed my behavior towards lots of purchase decision which were not thought through earlier by me or my husband. In fact some of these were never so called purchase decisions rather they used to be just one of those impromptu expenses. Read More at Marketing Chit-Chat...

Aren’t we obsessed with dieting?

Yesterday I chanced to dine with one of my associates along with her young daughter. While we were ordering the meal, this young girl was absolutely not willing to eat anything. When her mother insisted a lot, she ordered some sandwich and that too she left it half eaten saying she is done. I asked smilingly if she has already eaten her meals or she did not like the sandwich of that place. Her mother replied, “no yaar, she is again on diet”! “Diet!!! But why and what’s her age???”, she looked perfectly alright to me, in fact I found her to be slimmer than average teen age girls of her age. I think she was hardly 14-15 years old. The gal who was on her fancy mobile by now gave a glance to her mother and walked away and then that lady heaved an exasperated sigh saying her daughter and her friend circle is crazily obsessed with slim figure, size zero, dieting and what nots! Even if some of the gals are perfectly alright including her daughter but still they are perpetually on diet. Their success parameter is to get fitted into tops and t-shirts from kid’s section of apparel stores and if someday they can’t fit and if they have to end up buying clothes from the section meant for their age then it’s nothing less than a disaster! Those days get followed by weeks of dieting and survival on juices and soups. Her daughter hardly eats one meal a day as she is always afraid that she will put on weight!!!

I was sort of shocked. Not that I am not aware of craziness for hourglass figure and picture perfect look amongst youngsters but dieting at that age and for no good reason left me amazed! If you ask me, that gal really needed to put on some weight and here she was surviving on juices and soups. One quick flash back at what I was doing at her age and all I could think of was board exams and my braided look! In our times, in fact our mothers used to force us with all nutritious and home cooked food so that we can have good health and concentrate more on studies. Size Zero and hourglass figure were unheard kind of terms. Well, I know time has changed a lot but so much? It’s not that I am myself not conscious about my weight or dieting etc but then I don’t think I have ever been obsessed about the same. To me a healthy body is more important than a thin body, a fit figure is more important than a slim figure and it’s ok to sometimes have those few extra kgs for the sake of ice-cream or chocolates :-). After all I don’t need to walk the ramp tomorrow and I know that those can be shed if I put in some healthy effort like exercise and walk. Who doesn’t want to have a model like figure but starving oneself to achieve that or dieting in an unhealthy way is nothing less than madness. There are many ways to maintain that “oh so perfect body” but guess most of us esp. teenage girls are just not willing to put in those effort. And this gal is just another example of soooo many people around me who speak nothing but DIETING and WEIGHT LOSS! Aren’t we obsessed with these two terms now? Probably Fashion ka hai yeh Jalwa... :-)

“Let’s pool in”: Car pooling campaign in Bangalore

I have sort of become a very regular listener of Radio One because of it being the only Bollywood fm channel in Bangalore as of now and of late I have been hearing this “Let’s pool in’ campaign quite a lot on this channel. It’s a public service initiative launched by Radio One in association with Commute Easy and Bangalore Traffic Police to address the traffic woes of the city. Read More At Marketing Chit-Chat...