Marketers love rituals around their brands. Corona beer is always drunk from the bottle with a wedge of lime stuck in the neck. Everyone breaks a Kitkat by sliding a finger down the ridge. And tequila has it’s own unique ceremony for drinking it. Once we see a new and shiny technique that…

I have begun to write a fortnightly column (every other Tuesday) on Exchange 4 Media also called Marketing Unplugged. The first one appeared today and you can see the original by clicking here. The text of it is below: Hello and welcome to the Marketing Unplugged blog. This is a blog that celebrates unconventional…

This article first appeared in Exchange4media and FirstPost on Jan 10, 2012. Ramu Dosawala is a popular man in Bandra. He has a road side stall off Carter Road from where he serves dosas. His Mysore dosa is highly recommended. But the reason that he is popular goes beyond just the quality of his food. It is…

This article was written for MxM India and appeared there on July 3, 2012. Click here for the original article 1. The marketer has to define the category he is in: Marketers should define their category by the way their customers see it, rather than the way the industry sees it wrote Theodore Levitt…

Veteran advertising professional Suman Srivastava, who is vice-chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at FCB Ulka, has authored a book entitled ‘Marketing Unplugged’. In this interview with Pradyuman Maheshwari, Srivastava talks about the changing demands of marketing in India, and how the world’s biggest brands were not built on huge ad spends You’ve dwelt on the…

The main reason why the old marketing doesn’t work now as well as before is that consumers have caught on to the old tricks. It’s like a lover using the same old words to his beloved. After a while, they become routine and lose their thrill. In marketing, as in love, innovation is…

‘You don’t know what you know until you write it down and publish a book’. Suman Srivastava, Vice Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, FCB Ulka Group, quotes his mother while saying this when we called him up to get an in-depth idea of his book ‘Marketing Unplugged’. Launched recently, ‘Marketing Unplugged’ is authored by Srivastava…

Suman Srivastava, Vice Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer, FCB Ulka Group, seeks to highlight the marketing truths that companies tend to ignore (the elephants in the room) in his recently launched book – ‘Marketing Unplugged: Spotting The Elephants In The Room’. Some of these truths are ‘consumers are not rational’, ‘consumers hate making…

Veteran advertising professional Suman Srivastava, who is vice-chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at FCB Ulka, has authored a book entitled ‘Marketing Unplugged’. In this interview, Srivastava talks about the changing demands of marketing in India, and how the world’s biggest brands were not built on huge ad spends You’ve dwelt on the changes…

August 21, 2011 The sixties sounds like such a long time ago. 5 decades ago. Half a century ago. 50 years ago. And it is a long time back. There is virtually no industry that uses technology that was invented in the sixties. Can you imagine driving a car invented in that era…