Kingston has launched its first ever TV commercial to market its pen drives. The ad has got a funky look with all the music and dance and party but it seriously lacks in any direction whatsoever. The advertisers are mindlessly targeting the youth with the same tricks of gaana-bajaana and Bollywood like dances. They desperately need to differentiate themselves if they are serious about their investments in advertising. Many Indian brands are already doing the same stuff with little or no success. By the way, I was expecting something related with technology and stuff or anything which I could discuss with my mates who are into technology. This is one disappointing attempt but we can understand that Kingston has a very good image in the Indian computer hardware and peripherals market and it just wants to capitalize on that by going for more visibility. I have not seen the commercial on TV yet but it is available on youtube.

Bollywood is the biggest cultural export from India and it’s popularity is rising like petrol prices across the world. It is yet to give Hollywood a run for the money but it certainly has started to make Hollywood producers take note of the appeal of Indian films across the Indian subcontinent & among the Indian diaspora elsewhere. All that’s for the sake of giving a foundation to the story, the point I really want to make is that it’s high time that Indian film industry start marketing itself as a unit to create a brand. Bollywood is a bad name to market as it tries to portray Indian film industry as a poor cousin to Hollywood. Remember that froogle can never be as successful as google just because the latter overshadows the former with its sheer recall value & impact. I don’t remember any instance when a company has become more successful with a name which sounds like an already successful company doing in the same sector. There has to be a Pepsi for Coke not Poke.

The first thing that Bollywood should do is to change its name to a more apposite one like Nutanki which actually popularized the performing arts in India and became an inspiration for people to capture it on screen. The name has become a kind of joke these days but it still is much better than ‘Bollywood’. The name change would definitely bring in free publicity from across the world while they can do something spectacular for advertising their new name. Hollywood did that by building Hollywood Sign on the hills of Los Angeles. Indian film industry should do more spectacular than that. It could be anything but serious. Indians must retain the tradition of story telling in their films with songs and music mixed in. Musicals are the strength of Indian film makers and they should not buckle under any desire to compete with Hollywood films by manipulating the Indian art of story telling. And to end my viewpoint I would like to add that Indians should keep the true meaning of cinema alive i.e. celebration of life.

To start with Planman are the guys who’ve given us management institutes like IIPM (or the other way round) and (once used to be good) magazines like Business & Economy, 4Ps, The Sunday Indian and The Indian PC Magazine. These guys did things in marketing that nobody else did before them in India like bringing out full page ads in leading newspapers to promote their management institutes regularly (no other institute did that with the kind of frequency before). They did the same kind of promotion for their movie called ‘Rok Sako To Rok Lo’ which bombed at the box office. One of the reason behind the box office disaster might be that it was made with mind and not heart. They did all kinds of management surveys and stuff before making that movie.

And then they committed another blunder with their business magazine Business & Economy which I must admit was doing pretty well till they increased the price of mag from 10 Rupee to 20 Rupee. This compelled other magazines like Business Today to increase their prices too (Business Today increased their price to 15 Rupee from 10 Rupee). Unfortunately the increase in price of Business & Economy marked with increase in marketing ‘junk’ too. Suddenly there were all kinds of advertisements of local hair oil, cheap holidays and stupid life coaches. At least they could have given a thought to the implications of such poor quality ads on the image of their brand. But they continued to compromise the quality with sponsored editorials and other crap. The rollback in prices didn’t help later. And then they came up with other magazines with the same kind of mediocre quality and mistakes.

But I guess their biggest blunder have been their job search site called kkoooljob which has exotic spellings as you can see. Who came up with this name is a mystery but it’s foolish in my view to market a site with such spellings.