Unleashing the Brand Marketing with the Ladoo Power.

From a fruit juice brand to a health drink brand, from a fashion retail brand to the other fast moving consumer goods brands, every brand in the Indian market wants to get associated with this Indian super hero to promote their offerings to their audiences. Guess who this super hero is.. those who guessed G-ONE (from Shahrukh’s movie RA-ONE are absolutely wrong). I am talking about the mighty kid dressed in orange dhotis from a small village called dholakpur, the super kid “CHHOTA BHEEM”.

Gone are the days when the kids used to keep their eyes glued to the televisions watching their favourite comic like Popeye, Dexter, Swat Kats, Pokemon or any other comic show? The young lad from Dholakpur is the new super star in the minds of these kids. Started almost 3 years ago by a company know as Green Gold Animation Pvt Ltd, this show has come far winning the hearts of millions of kids in India. It came up with a unique character and story line which would well go in attracting the Indian kids. The Company also came up with shows like Krishna & Balram, Vikram & Betal which have really helped it in coming up with this successful show. Considering its popularity, POGO TV also promoted this show to a greater extent.

When it comes to the rating factor, Chhota Bheem is rated as the Number 1 children’s show from India. As of 2012 it has aired over 120 episodes and more to come in the following days. Green Gold Pvt Ltd was    quick enough to take away this momentum of success and launched comics, video games, Chotta Bheem          merchandise, toys and more. After several short episodes, a full length feature film  titled "Chhota Bheem And The Curse Of Damyaan" was released in 2012 and was a surprise success at the box office grossing    over 2 crore net in its first week despite having a limited release.

From a marketing point-of-view one needs to know about what did the brands do with the success of this comic character. Big brands like Boost, Pepsodent, Knorr Soups, Del Monte, MAX fashion retail and others quickly adapted this concept in their marketing activities for the success of their brands. Pepsodent also launched a social media campaign contest for promotion. In order to reach the kids segments they bundled chotta bheem toys & freebies with their offerings to attract the kids segment. They adapted the unique positioning of this character in the minds of audiences to their brand advantage, and it worked. 

The Company Green Gold also came up with various offerings for the kids segment in order to attain additional revenues. Sales have seemed to have gone up after this marketing initiative. Games and App developers have already come up with their Chotta Bheem games & apps for the customers.

Truly kids too have their space & role in making a purchase decision and brands have clearly won in gaining their attention and came out successful with their strategies.  

Google Plus Business Page & it’s benefits for Businesses.

Google is becoming better each day with it’s new kind of features & services which have an impact on it’s search functionality.

With the launch of a new social networking platform it’s intentions were clear that it wanted to over power & over take the much hyped social media website Facebook & guess what, it did manage to achieve this popularity & viral ness from the initial days of the launch of Google Plus.

As we all know online marketing has become a very important aspect of each brand’s highly impact ful marketing plan it’s very important for a marketing person to analyse the various platforms of online marketing to achieve the desired level of ROI & impact on it’s audiences. One such area we need to focus is Google Plus business pages.

Apart from the stunning new features on Google Plus, it did come up with the business pages for brands, celebrities etc (much like the facebook business page) so as to provide a direct option of interaction between the brands & its clients and fans. It’s much like facebook fan page but have some extra facilities which facebook fan page doesn’t.

Benefits’s of having a business page on Google Plus :

• Google search engine indexing - Google pulls out the search result from Google Plus business page too & hence you have an option to rank for a search query from you GooglePlus page posting too.
• Google’s service - for the google Plus page, users will get a broad array of services like search, Gmail, Chrome and Android which other SMM providers like facebook & twitter can’t provide.
• A platform to connect with your fans & followers - lot of fans are spending their time on Google Plus connecting with their likes & interests.
• Unique functionality of hangouts (live video chats) - Not only can you talk with your customers via text but now you can have video talk sessions with them. An effective & low cost option to connect with your followers & get instant feedback on your offerings. The system is very responsive and the audio video quality is fine.
• Build your brand - Branding your business helps people to become familiar with your products and services. Having a Google Plus business page enables you to interact with others who also have created accounts.

Apart from these there are many other benefits of having a Google Plus business page:

Google Plus Button

The Plus1 button helps your website visitors to recommend your content or products, and share that content with their circles on Google Plus.

Google Plus Direct Connect

You can find a desired page on Google Plus very easily from its simple search feature. With Google Plus Direct Connect, searchers can insert a “Plus” before their query and land directly to a business’s GooglePlus page. For example, Type “+PCQuest” into a Google search box, and Google will take you straight to PCQuest’s Google Plus page.

Google Plus Badge

This badge is an enhanced version of the Google Plus icon. It allows visitors to directly connect your site to your Google Plus page and find and engage with you on Google Plus.

With day by day Google making a new change to it’s search functionality, it’s very important for brands to have a Google Plus page & reap the search engine & other benefits from it. So why wait it’s time to have your’s. 

Brand Wars, inspired from the history – a new era to be written

From those sweet tasting colas to those shiny shampoos, from those healthy health drinks to those luxurious airlines, each brand had their own style & strategy of competing with their rivals though their interesting yet innovative campaigns. It seems that after all that controversy & calmness the brands have again risen to comparative advertising.

It all started with the cola brands, the arch rivals – Coca Cola Inc & Pepsio Co’s series of comparative advertising well know as the cola wars. Both the brands successfully cashed in on this concept to be in the spotlight. This effect was also seen in when Coca‐Cola became the official cold drink of the1996 cricket World Cup & Pepsi greeted coke with the campaign ‘Nothing official about it’. Later, Coke had to reply with another campaign - “Eat Cricket! Sleep Cricket! Drink only Coca‐Cola!” This continued many times before it became stable.

   

Then came the era of detergent wars between Tide & Rin which was taken to court to sort out legally. We have also seen this effect spreading in other industries to other brands like Head & Shoulders and Pantene face-off, Horlicks v/s Complan tussle, & not to be forgotten Sprite v/s Mountain dew panga.

To quote the latest rivalry between The Hindu & TOI, it all started when The Times Of India (TOI) had recently, around November  taken a dig at The 

Hindu with its campaign ‘Wake Up Chennai‘ where they had clearly targeted 

The Hindu. The Hindu commands to be holding the number 1 spot in Chennai, though a late reply it was a awesome reply. It has come up with its ‘Stay Ahead Of The Times’ campaign making an aggressive counter attack at the TOI with it’s different patterned print ads & TVC. Well unlike The Hindu, the TOI had an immediate say on the counter attack with a cool & calm reply in its ad – We congratulate the competition fpr finally waking up.

To conclude, comparative advertising might be good at times to pull the competitor’s leg & be in the spotlight but it might also tarnish a brand’s own image & hurt entire product segment. It is good only to an extent with the campaign being creative & not attacking the rival brand directly.

Woah look at this, the latest buzz is Bajaj Discover targeting it's rival Hero Honda Splendor in it's latest TVC - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyp1QECfas4