Advertising for Morphy Richards

I spent some time this weekend working on an advertising assignment that was due today. We were asked to prepare a single-page print advertisement for Morphy Richards, for any/all of their products.

So here's how I went thinking about this assignment:

1. Identify the attributes of the current advertising Morphy Richards uses:
1. Clean advertising & simplicity - no garish images
2. Their products don't have any major differentiator, so current advertising doesn't use the "buy this because we're better" tag line. Instead, their advertisements try to instil a positive association of the product.
2. Most of their products are for the homemaker (read the woman in the household) - the ad has to appeal to women, it would influence buying decisions on their entire product range.
   
3. Use creativity to generate emotional appeal - reinforce the feeling of homeliness with Morphy Richards products.
4. Identify which product(s) I want to create the advertisement for. I ended up deciding between sandwich makers and hair dryers.

Once these decisions were done, I went about using a combination of google's image search, my creativity, and my skills at gimp & MS paint to come up with these.


The first one


This one turned out to be really clean with a "can't hurt the eye" white background. But the image was bad - it was a sandwich that wasn't from a sandwich maker! Surely the prof (or anyone else) would see through that. And see through that, my quaddie did. Back to the drawing board...


Another sandwich maker ad



So this one featured an improved tag line. Had gotten rid of the "A sandwich" trailer. But there were three problems with this one:

1. the colours are not uniform throughout - half the ad is in a shade of brown and the other half in a bluish grey
2. the sandwich is ugly - it is a very greasy sandwich that no health-concious homemaker would ever giver her child.
3. In hindsight, the tag line doesn't make any sense. How can a sandwich be the next best thing to sliced bread - a sandwich should be better than sliced bread, shouldn't it? I'd worked on the tag line from the phrase "the greatest invention since sliced bread", but I'd lost the meaning somewhere during the transition.

Time to move over to another product - let's check out the hair dryers.

The first hair dryer ad
So, who would buy a hair dryer? A woman who has a bad hair day. Hmm, more googling and more work on gimp made me come up with this:


All right, now I'm violating the cleanliness principle. Yeah, the colours probably look good, and the format is fairly simple - visual description of the problem, textual description of the problem, visual description of the solution. But the woman is not right - she looks agitated. And people never look agitated in a Morphy Richards ad.

So the challenge is now - come up with a visual description of a bad hair day that would appeal to women, without indicating any agitation.

Well, more googling, and this is what we come up with:

The final one



And did the ad work? I don't know - I submitted this to the prof only today. But a few "oh cho cute" comments from the target segment did make me think it's come out well :-)

Thanks V, I couldn't have done this assignment without your feedback.

Words Worth

ISB is conducting a competition to test your thinking.
The prize, for the 15 best entries, is a trip to ISB.

Check out the competition at http://www.isb.edu/wordsworth/

an afterthought

A few weeks back, we had our annual alumni reunion, Solstice (just realised I'd been misspelling it all along as Solistice). When the alumni introduced themselves, they always tagged their year of graduation to their name. They'd go "I'm R, '04" and "I'm S, '06" and so on.

Next year, I'll able to introduce myself as, "I'm Chiranth, double o' seven".

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Among other things, I managed to write three exams last week, and a 4918 word essay on Outsourcing. Was about to overshoot the limit of 5 grand, but managed to bring it down. Weekend was a good break - watched loads of movies. Did some productive work too, like changing my desktop's wallpaper, contemplating to clear my desk, etc.

Classes start again tomorrow... er, in a few hours. I'd better get some sleep.

HNY!!

Wish you all a very happy new year!!

Very Funny Ads

Check this site out: http://veryfunnyads.com/

gmail search tip

Gobbledygook version
gmail indexes whole words separated by whitespaces, not partial subsets of text.

In plain english
When searching for different word forms, such as publish and publication in gmail, it's necessary to search for both words separately. Searching for publi is not going to fetch any results :-(

What MGTO missed out

Watch Kramer vs Kramer or Jerry Maguire? The scenes where the two chaps get fired are pretty neat, eh? Here's a thought. Would an MBA grad be able to fire the two characters any differently?

Is there a fundamental disconnect from being an MBA grad and being a manager? Sure, an MBA (maybe) teaches us the quant skills and the hard facts to look out for when we are running a show. But then, doesn't it take a bit more to be a manager? Let's go back to the firing aspect - how would I, as an MBA grad, be able to tell a subordinate that he is going to lose his job, because of no fault of his? Should I take solace in the fact that it is a decision based on profitability?

A lot of companies go through crunch situations, and lay people off at one time or the other. Strangely, some people are willing to go back and work for the very same companies when times improve. I think that probably happens out of goodwill, more than anything else, of the managers. And I doubt one can learn how to create that goodwill at a b-school. Yeah, you could have courses which focus on how to improve one's personality, and how one should train oneself to react to situations; you could also have other influences during an MBA program, such as ideas of social responsibility. That, however, is one end of the spectrum. On the other end, an MBA might teach you how ensuring goodwill with fired employees reduces recruitment cost later. Somewhere between these two extremes is where MBA programs are creating the manager of today.

MGTO = Management of Organisations, a course we had in the fourth term, one of the few people-related courses we've had.

Another ad mismatch

Paresh Rawal danced to a "ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-ri, pizza aaye free" for Domino's. That tune doesn't seem to go very well in the Arshad Warsi ad, does it?

PM on the steel industry

Excerpt from the PM's speech at the IISCO steel plant, Burnpur, West Bengal. Here's a link to the story on NDTV.

Why does Lakshmi Mittal or Ratan Tata have to buy foreign companies to establish a global presence and expand steel capacities when our per capita consumption of steel is so low and when there is so much opportunity here?

Let me see if I understand the PM's statement correctly. Is he suggesting that:
1. Mittal & Tata should not be establishing a global presence? OR
2. Mittal & Tata buy only Indian companies to establish a global presence? OR
3. Mittal & Tata should match their companies' production capacity only to match domestic demand, which currently happens to be low, but could rise in the future?

Maybe we should just stop attempting to make sense of ambigous statements made by politicians and assume they're playing to the crowd.

The network comes home

They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. And they come with different ideas of life. Each one of them is brimming with gyaan about the college, about resumes, about life, about careers, about everything. And boy, are they getting an audience. Here's what's happening. Our annual alumni reunion - Solistice - is on this weekend, and the alumni have descended from all over to our campus. I guess it's a good way to end a week that was jam-packed with assignments for almost everyone.

I ran into alienwan shortly after he landed up on campus. Almost expected him to be reviewing someone's resume, and he didn't disappoint. Also met ford prefect. There are loads of other alumni I met, some for the first time. Interesting to hear what they had to say about post-ISB-life.

They've started to test the speakers on the lawns outside our block.. looks like it'll be a very loud party tonight. I'd better finish that SOMG work in the next 120 minutes :-(

INPE + CFPD + MHTP = a big smile

Advertisements, rebranding & bias

• KitKat's latest advertisement shows people wearing pants twice the size they usually wear. So, is KitKat now a health food?
• Sony Ericson advertises a music player.. it takes a while for the viewer to realise it's a mobile phone. Got to admit, I love this ad; should try to locate it on youtube sometime.
• ThumsUp rebrands itself as a men's drink, something that women won't understand.

Seriously, what's up with these brands?

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When on of our professors fired a "name three ads that you've seen today", we were stumped for a few minutes. He went on to say, "See, that's advertising for you. There's hardly any recall." I agreed with him then. But now I don't. If you ask people to name three political news headlines they've seen today, chances are good that they'll be stumped on that question too. That, dear readers, is selection bias.

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BTW, as the first three lines show, I seem to fare better on ad recall than the news recall :-( I hope advertising turns out to be a good elective next term.

Using tab-stops in MS Word

This post ought to interest people who are busy updating their resumes.

Please open up your resume in MS Word, and hit the button that looks like this symbol - ¶. That button is available on the standard toolbar – you might have to add buttons to view it.

Now, let’s take a look at two snapshots of a resume.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Make note of the poor alignment on the right side in Figure 1. The two lines don’t end at exactly the same length. What’s more, there’s an arbitrary number of tabs and space bars one has had to use to get the alignment as close as possible to ideal. But hey, what happens when you change the margins of the document? You’d have to go tabbing and spacing all over again to fix the alignment. Figure 2, on the other hand, seems a lot crisper. There’s only one tab that has been used, and that has taken care of everything. If figure 1 is what your resume looks like, and figure 2 is how you would like it to look, please read on.

The following steps will help you use a feature called “tab-stops” which is present in most word-processing software (including MS Word), but can be quite a pain to understand and use.

So, here’s what you need to do:

1. Create a new style
1. Menus --> Format --> Styles & Formatting
2. Click on New Style. Specify the name, font, font-size, etc. Ensure that the Style Type is set to Paragraph.
3. Click on “Format”
4. Click on “Tabs”. A new options box should pop-up. The tab stop position should be set by default to 1’’
5. Click on “Clear All”
6. In the tab stop position, write in the length of your horizontal ruler. This would typically be the width of your page minus the margins that you’ve specified. For a page setup using “Letter”, and margin 1.25”, this would be 8.25” – 1.25” -1.25” = 6”
7. Set the alignment as "Right".
   
8. Click on “Set”, then “Ok”
9. Save the style with a meaningful name
2. Write out your line saying “Indian School of Business Hyderabad India”. Ensure that you provide only one tab between the words “Business” and “Hyderabad”
3. Apply your newly created style to the line.

Hopefully, your alignment problem would be solved. Now, if you need to change the margins of your page, you’d need to reset the tab stop position to something that suits the new margins.

She said he said she said...

..that so-and-so are seeing each other.

Now, I know these two quite well.. and I'm really surprised they didn't tell me themselves. It's not like I'd go and tell people and start gossipping. I might blog about it though, but that's not the same as gossipping.

Bottomline - A party's due!!

Taxi Tale

The gatekeeper had a pleasant smile, but it was definitely made up. No one likes being woken up at four in the morning, why should the gatekeeper be any different? Nevertheless, he had done his job satisfactorily after being woken up, he'd called for a taxi well before dawn for the two guests of the family in Apartment 14-A. Now the taxi was here, and the two guests were getting in now - luggage in the trunk, trunk snap shut, people in the car, doors shut, and the taxi was off.

M & Chi had reached Mumbai the previous night from Hyderabad, shortly after midnight. M's uncle had an apartment in Worli, where they caught up on a few hours' rest. And they were to catch a flight at this ungodly hour to Indore. In Chi's opinion, it was a crime to expect someone to wake up before 10:00 on any given day. And this was a weekend. To make matters worse, time adds up. If a flight is supposed to leave at five-forty, which by itself is bad enough, they expect you to check in at least half an hour earlier. Add travel time to the airport, and the time it takes to get ready, and then the additional buffer time in case something goes wrong. All of that meant waking up at four in the morning. But there wasn't anyone he could complain to; after all, it was he who'd booked the flight tickets. Now in the taxi, Chi thought he could catch a few winks, but one knows how sleep is. It doesn't come by when one needs it the most.

Neither Chi, nor M was familiar with Mumbai. M had close relatives there, but had never lived with them. Chi had lived there ages ago, but he was too young to remember it. Yeah, there was something that Chi noticed - Mumbai's roads were better than Hyderabad's. Maybe it was because of the early hour, but they seemed a lot wider than any road that Chi had seen. Another few hours, and these roads would be bustling with the life that Mumbai is known for. He imagined how the roads in Indore would be like - probably narrow and very pot-holed. He'd find out soon enough. They'd be in Indore by 6:30 or 6:45, around two hours from now. Hmmm.. almost 15 minutes had gone by sitting in the taxi. The airport was a good half an hour from the apartment, so they were almost half way through.

It was a too early in the day for any coherent thought. Maybe the upcoming competition at Indore had filled M's mind, Chi kept checking and re-checking their flight tickets. It was an Indian flight, he wondered if Indian's breakfast is any good. Strange name, Indian. You've known the airline as Indian Airlines all your life, and one fine day, someone just renames the airline as Indian. He wondered what they got out of the entire renaming the exercise. They keep doing this renaming business at Bangalore, Chi's hometown. Chi often thought when Brigade Road would be renamed.

It was 4:40 now, they should be reaching the airport. Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport. And yes, the taxi was slowing down. But the familiar ramp of two terminals at the airport was not to be seen. Maybe it was right around the corner. There came a small fork in the road, and the driver pulled the taxi to a halt. Surely there was nothing wrong with the taxi, for the engine was still running.

The driver turned around and asked, "Aapko VT ke railway station jaana hai ki Bombay Central?"

Damned gatekeeper!


Epilogue
For the next half hour, the taxi flew faster than any aircraft that I'd been in. We managed to reach the airport at a quarter past five, and yes, we were in time for check-in.

At Indore, I exited on the first day of the Ashwamedha, but M made it to the second round. SS, from IIMI won the competition. More on that in a future post.