Innocent!

For a couple of years now, I have been quite in awe of the Innocent Smoothies Brand. 
They represent to me, what happens when passion meets entrepreneurship. 
The history of the brand's beginnings had made me very curious. It goes thus:

Richard, Adam and Jon left university and went into the obligatory milk-round professions 
- one into advertising, two into management consultancy.

Four years later, they were still talking about their business idea, 
although they still had no product.

In 1998, after six months of trying out recipes on friends, they spent £500 on fruit,
turned it into smoothies, and sold them at a small music festival in London.

Their much-recounted scenario goes like this:

"We put up a big sign saying, 
'Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?' 
and put out a bin saying 'YES' and a bin saying 'NO' and asked people to put 
the empty bottle in the right bin.

"At the end of the weekend the 'YES' bin was full 
so we went in the next day and resigned."

- Just an Innocent Business, by Laura Cummings, BBC

I also loved their simple, honest-to-God kind of Advertising, from on-pack to on-distribution vans 
to on the usual billboards, etc. Check out a few examples here:

Some more advertising of Innocent that I had saved
in my personal choice folder were these,

Innocent employs 275 people, has a turnover of more than £100m and sells about
two million smoothies per week.
CocaCola recently acquired a 20-30% stake in Innocent for £30m.
This will apparently let Innocent Smoothies reach out to a larger global market.
Awaiting the same.

In the mean time, the Indian fruit juice market has seen a lot of activity with a new category
emerging, the 100% juice category, see article in afaqs .
After Dabur's Real, Pepsi's Tropicana, Parle Agro also launched their 100% fruit juice
'Saint'. It immediately reminded me of 'Innocent'

(pic courtesy: Campaign India)

Then I came across this new campaign from Saint on the Mumbai billboards,

which reminded me some more. Take a look.

Till the summers last...yours innocently :-)

Lipstick sales indicate Economic Scenario

I am sure most people have heard of the Big Mac Index. The Economist magazine attempts
to light-heartedly show the economic scenario of a country from the purchasing power parity
perspective of the price of a Big Mac in each country.

 

 Have now come across another interesting trend from an Economics point of view. 

Presenting the Lipstick Indicator. Estee Lauder Chairperson Leonard Lauder coined 

the word Lipstick Index after the 9-11 depression. 

The Newyork Times notes Lipstick sales to have upped by 40%.

Even in the Indian Market, Lipstick sales are up growing at 20%.

  

(Image courtesy - The trendspotting Blog) 

 

 (Image courtesy - thisismoney.co.uk)

There are other things like Booze and  Skirt Length theories also, read more here.
So the next time you visit the mall with your girlfriend or wife,
buy her a Lipstick, at least!

Ambient Media gone wrong or Pure Scam?

Would you use these tissues? Recycling be damned!

 

via :  Adsoftheworld

Credits - By Far, Denmark

Released - Juxt Consult India Online 2009 Study

Yes, it's out again. The Juxt Consult report on Indian Internet Advertising.
Interestingly, the study claims that the total number of Internet users in India has gone down from 49 million in 2008 to 47 million in 2009.

Of the 47 million users, 39 million consumers stay in urban areas, while 8 million reside in rural places.
(courtesy afaqs article on the same)

The fall seems to be due to the fall in occasional users, while regular users have gone up by 10%.
A whopping 71% of Internet users stay in the non-metros. Now you can go out and tell all those doubting thomases who brush the Internet aside as a metro phenomenon.

Other interesting findings, Of the regular Internet users, about 5 million also surf the Internet on mobile phones. About 80 per cent of the users are in the age group of 19-35 years.

For a snapshot of the Juxt Consult report for 2009, see this deck.

Snapshot Of Juxt Consult India Online 2009 Study

View more presentations from inetk.

Is your business pitch starting right?

Reality 1: Times are bad.
Reality 2 : Many opting out and setting up on their own.
Reality 3: New Businesses are hard to come by

Isn't it time, you paid more attention to your pitch, beginning with your business calling card.
In the light of this thinking came across these gems. Go ahead, get inspired :-)

 

  

  

 All the above, courtesy of Ivan's blog ; many more there, take a look.

Another bunch of designs on this flickr page  

I remember erstwhile Indian agency RMG David (now, Bates David Enterprise), had an interesting bunch too, using baby pictures of each of the employees.

While looking up other articles on visiting cards, came across this one, from ET, interesting read and one I had written previously.

CelebTrack - Is it worth the money?

Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Shahrukh Khan, Sachin Tendulkar, MS Dhoni, Aishwarya Rai, Katrina Kaif.... Do they really think it's worth spending Rs. 10.8 lakh to unlock this secret?

Well, any marketing and advertising professional worth his salt can come up with this list, even a layman with some common sense can tell you this! This is just one more of those shallow marketing gimmicks and I wonder how easy it is to make money out of these cash-rich companies who do not think before spending on such obviously overrated tools!

- Thus reads one of the comments that accompanied the revelation of CelebTrack, Percept Talent Management & Hansa Research's new tool to track Celebrities.

The report goes on to say, the tool measures the celebrity power score (CPS) across five parameters -- media presence, popularity (what proportion of people like the celebrity), image attributes (whether the celebrity is charming, quick witted, stylish, classy, funny and so on), power of persuasion ( how the celebrity image attribute will help the brand) and overexposure.

Methinks the lady is right. Take a bow Anujai Saxena! The report is here :