B.T.M. BITES

Severe time crunch,limited electric supply and almost a decade old desktop are my top 3 excuses for the brief hibernation of blog.

Anyways let me quickly run through the things i wanted to blog but couldn’t.(in random order)

• Bing is doing better than expected but Google still rules as the default search engine,but when comes to niche search Bing may shine better and since Bing now throws up Twitter search results, which may or may not be better than Google results but definitely different from it.
• Some brands just live forever ,like MJ(not me  but the original moonwalker).
  • Mass Media had a good week as  MJ’s “mystery death” was “breaking news”  for more than 2 days,tribute stories,special shows,continuous coverage,cover story…imagine the ad revenues for that two days.i heard even newspapers got sold out in some parts of US (newspapers are on verge of becoming historical artifacts esp. in US)
  • MJ’s sudden death also resulted in sudden surge in the sales of his albums.
  • “I Was At Glasto 09 When Jacko Died” T shirts were being sold the very next day of his death (i am sure the idea did not come from an MBA marketing)
  • But some MBA’s are already drawing up business plans to make his Neverland ranch into a music museum cum theme park which would “pop” profits. I am sure  this MJ mania will continue foe some more time because he was not just a pop singer  but a  iconic brand himself.
• When the world was watching US going Ga Ga over the new smart phones, a startup in Madurai(my hometown ) has  rolled out Red Chery , a Indian alternative for Black Berry.  Red Chery fetches corporate emails to your mobile which is what Black Berry is famous for.
  • Although the firm  says “Red Chery stands for 'Revolutionary (red) Change Enabled Reach for You’ it is obvious that it wants to be associated with  Blackberry one way or another
  • Rajiv and me have had many discussions about this type of branding using the opposites of the existing brand – (black-red;berry-cherry) –we think it will work if a brand wants to remain as a follower acting as an alternative (usually low priced ) –ideally it should be termed ‘reverse branding’ since it already has another definition, we could call it opposite branding or mirror branding(same but reversed).
• Videocon has a renewed logo,which I personally think is  not suitable for a consumer electronics company but looks like logo of a health food brand.
• Sony’s Walkman was named as the top music invention of last 50 years which is  like the first generation of portable media player
• I tried the new Opera.. nothing great.you can skip it… i recommend  the latest FireFox 3.5 RC.

Last but not least …

• Twitter’s potential was unleashed when US Govt requested the micro blogging site to postpone its weekly maintenance as Twitter was the only source of real time updates on Iran elections where news channels and other traditional media sources were restricted.Looks like Twitter has arrived….