• Green Evangelist

    Green Evangelist aims to ‘evangelise’ sustainability through the ‘humanware’ aspect rather than the ‘techware’. In conversation with founders Sejal Sheth and Latha Sankarnarayan….

    [scribd id=84602869 key=key-25o0y2t76pj5kyhguclg mode=list]

  • Human Brands

    Trendwatching’s trend for March 2012 is quite an interesting one – ‘Flawsome‘, driven by brands becoming more ‘human’ and the fast rise of transparency. It’s quite an irony – this ‘fall out’ of the era in which people are trying to be brands and making sure that (even) their Facebook Timeline (in addition to LI, Twitter etc) showcase them at their best/ a perfect life. Yes, I’m generalising.

    I think, more than anything else, this trend is forced on brands by the sheer volume of conversations that are generated in/by social media. Even the best, most conversational and favourite brands/organisations – from Coke to Google to Twitter to Apple etc have their flaws. These cause different challenges for different brands eg. web centric companies generate conversations because of their ‘location’  and more is expected of them because they are digital natives; ‘offline’ brands are forced to engage and include this in their brand DNA. Since bad experiences are expressed more than good ones, ‘flawsome’ is an inevitability.

    The excellent opportunity in this, if brands get the communication right, is to not just being able to involve consumers in correcting the flaws, but in also evolving a league of customers who will actively speak for the brand, because of a sense of ownership they can be made to develop. The other opportunity is to target better and build a set of consumers who can identify with the brands’s attitude and philosophy. This would not just have an effect on communication, but also on vision and processes across the board – product design, customer care, hiring and so on. ‘One size fits no one’ is something that brands could take more seriously now.

    As a brand marketer, and one who is active on social media, I’d love the freedom to say ‘Damn, that was a #fail. But hey, we tried” 🙂

    until next time, winsome brands

  • Now Running

    Already running late, and three minutes into the ride, she realised she had forgotten her purse…and the tickets in it. Cursing, he paid the auto driver, asked her to wait, and started running. Easier than getting the auto to go back. As he ran, the coincidence was unmistakeable. The tickets were for Paan Singh Tomar.

    (Based on a true story. No really!)

  • Once Upon a Timezone

    Neelesh Misra

    Bollywood style romance with a Hollywood heroine, that’s probably how I’d describe the book, not just because of the story and the characters, who seem perfect for a movie version, but also because of the pace of the book and the turns within.

    Neel Pandey, obsessed with America, but whose visa application gets rejected, settles for a vicarious experience – at a call centre, where he gets transformed into Neil Patterson, and falls in love with a customer, in far away America, even as his father tries to get him married to a girl of the right caste, and his mother, whose own dreams have been stifled thanks to her husband, looks on helplessly.

    Angela Cruz, fresh out of college and building a new life as a journalist, away from her race-obsessed father, is smitten by Neil Patterson, thanks to a phone call she makes to fix her computer. She is led to believe that he’s American, while she herself cooks up a story of her being a model.

    Their turbulent love life is what makes up the remainder of the book. In addition to the parents, there are also a couple of characters who play important roles – Neel’s friend Meenal, whom his dad wants him to marry, and Rocky Randhawa, a con artist who runs a business of supplying fake visas.

    The story itself is quite predictable, but is breezy enough to make for a non-boring read. The author does have a sense of humour, though cliches have been employed at regular intervals, mostly as devices to portray a stereotypical Indian middle class family. In essence, reading it won’t do you any irreparable damage.

  • OfferGrid

    OfferGrid provides activity based shopping network solutions to merchants, e-tailers, daily and group deal companies etc. In conversation with co-founder Deepankar Biswas….

     

    [scribd id=83600144 key=key-12qqadrqlw7lht0o3lq1 mode=list]