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.

I have recently started to listen radio on itunes and unfortunately there are only two Hindi radio stations which come preinstalled on it. So I tried to find out some good Bollywood or Hindi radio channels. The problem with some online stations was that they were not compatible with quicktime or itunes and I was not ready to adopt either winamp or windows media player or even real media player. And then there were some other radio stations which could only be played in the browser. But still I found out some decent stations for itunes.

1) Radio Teen Taal is a station which airs from Paris and it’s perhaps the most famous among all the stations I am going to mention. (128 kbps)

2) Radio Nimbooda is another station which is also based in Paris and their selection of music is pretty cool. You can expect some classics of golden era too. (128 kbps)

3) Bollywoodradio is a German radio station and it tends to stick to bollywood music. (128 kbps)

4) Mastradio is one station which I haven’t listened too much so just give it a try and hear for yourself. (128 kbps)

5) Bollywoodmusicradio is the station which I found while writing this post and it airs tracks limited to Bollywood alone. (128 kbps)

6) CrazeFM has a wide selection of music from India,Pakistan and expect some ghazals and remixes too. The only drawback is the bit rate of music on this station which is 40 kbps.

7) Eternalrafi is a station dedicated to Mohammad Rafi and it produces music of 24 kbps.

8) Indianelectronica is my personal favorite and it airs music from the Asian Underground and Indian Electronica genre. (96kbps)

Perhaps the biggest dilemma of the FMCG brand is to cater to the maximum consumers while keeping an adequate balance of niches. It always is a number game and thus its hard to categorize on the basis of income and aspirations or the mere fact that whether you should categorize at all.

Recently Mumbai based company Anchor which is known for electrical equipments has forayed into soap segment and thus trying to bite the share of biggies like Hindustan Unilever and P&G. Anchor’s quite naive in this segment and it clearly shows in their marketing and their whole approach of enticing the consumers.

First of all please tell me who came up with the name “DYNA” because I cant buy the idea that there’s some Indian behind this blunder because every Indian knows what it means in Hindi. OK for all those people short on hindi let me tell you what it means. But before that a little story.

There is this powder brand in India called DermiCool which is quite successful in villages as well as cities. In fact no brand in FMCG industry can be successful in India unless they don’t count villages into their scheme of things, after all 60% Indians live in villages. And companies thus need to be very careful while naming a brand because not all of them know English and thus people will relate the English name in their native language . They targeted the consumers wisely by having a name which rhymes with the season when people are going to use their product. Although I am not sure whether it was deliberate. Garmi is Hindi for the summer season and it clearly rhymes with dermi of Dermi Cool and after that they targeted the consumers with some very straight forward advertising counting the merits of using their brand in summer season (its not just summer season, its summer season in India).

Now coming back to Dyna. There’s a word in Hindi which means b***h and it rhymes 90% with the name of soap we are talking about. Its inevitable that consumers will relate the name and it wont do much good to the brand. I cant imagine an Indian company doing it.

Roping in Katrina Kaif as a brand ambassador who doesn’t know Hindi or for that matter is even more alien to India than Sonia Gandhi is not a wise decision in my view.