Creative slowdown

Slowdown is surely taking its toll on creativity, among other things. After the funny Finnair ad that I recently wrote about, it's now the turn of Singapore Airlines to get absurdly literal.

Making your customer smile

A Southwest Airlines flight attendant has turned the safety announcement rigmarole into an entertaining performance. When a service makes the customer smile, the brand checks into a cosy room in the consumer's mind.

Hat tip: John O'Leary

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a joke!

Started this morning with the best workout: a hearty laugh. This ad stared out of the newspaper. I stared back , and then laughed my lungs out.

The power of CEOspeak

The Hindustan Times reports:

“We have not and will not lay off no matter how bad it gets, even if recessionary trends get worse,” said Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies.

CEOs have this power. A single statement from the CEO can impact the company’s image in a manner that thousands of marketing dollars may not achieve.

At a time when the corporate world is leaving no stone unturned to cut costs, a statement like this requires courage, conviction and confidence. It sends out positive signals not only to employees, but also to customers and shareholders.

Incidentally, Vineet is one of the few Indian CEOs who blog regularly. Vineet’s blog is a great grazing place for unconventional fodder.

Insurance, get a life

I was appalled to see this HDFC Standard Life Insurance ad on television last night.

Agreed, to sell insurance you sometimes need to take the fear route, but to instill the fear of losing their daddies in children (agar aapke papa ghum ho gaye toh?), and then feeding on that fear to sell life insurance to the parent is insensitive, cheesy, even reckless.

And the timing! Releasing this offensive ad at a time when the country is recovering from a terror strike is as insensitive as it gets. Business mercenaries would of course argue that there's nothing wrong in striking the iron when it's hot.

By comparison, I find the Pepsi "suicide ads" far less offensive.

Testing times for Arjuna

This animation video has been floating around on the web.



Apparently, this is a TV ad made by JWT for Sulekha.com and it has been soft-launched on the Internet "to check people’s reactions to it before releasing it on television,” reports afaqs!

Online Reputation Management or Customer Satisfaction?

Last Sunday, I watched on bemused as three executives from Club Mahindra (a holiday timeshare brand) staged a funny pitch (they call it "presentation"). Will spare you the details, but in case you're interested, it was quite similar to this.

Curious about what people felt about Club Mahindra, I turned to Google and was hit with scores of pages that painted Club Mahindra in the brightest shades (examples here, here & here). However, most of these sites/blogs seemed to have been created by the company/employees.

I scratched the surface and came across a lot of outbursts against Club Mahindra: tales of anger, disgruntlement, disenchantment and frustration, to name a few.

I scratched some more and discovered that Club Mahindra has been sponsoring blogger meets at their resorts. It looks like the initiative has paid off. The invited bloggers have sung praises in Club Mahindra's favour (examples here, here & here).

It looks like Club Mahindra has focussed heavily on acquiring a clean online reputation, especially since their IPO is due. The favourable blogs have actually managed to push down the complaints, as far as search engine pageranks are concerned. However, I still maintain (as I had written in an earlier post) that in today's connected world, people will eventually find out the what other customers feel about your brand. It would help to dedicate time and energy to become more customer-centric than trying to manufacture online reputation. Perhaps it could have saved Club Mahindra this unenviable distinction.

Thoughts are welcome in the Comments section.