The Trump administration just announced a set of new reciprocal tariff rates for more countries and has set a new deadline of August 1, 2025 for these to take effect. It’s still early days, and it’s hard to tell their effect on consumer prices, on trade, and on consumption and economic growth, both in the… Continue reading Have Non-Tariff Ticket, Will Travel
Time to turn my attention to brands once again, after all the chaos and confusion that Trump’s tariffs have caused from the start of this year. I must say, though, that if companies have to raise prices of their goods in the US and elsewhere, it ought to be because of a superior dimension to… Continue reading Hardwiring Brands into Products and Services
While the connection between product sales or revenue and corporate performance is obvious and better understood in the world of business, the connection between brands and company performance is not so clear. This is because it is not a direct one. A recent post on LinkedIn and a comment to the post – to which… Continue reading Exploring the Connection Between Brands and Corporate Performance
The history of advertising and marketing is probably littered with scores of cases of companies and brands that began with a brilliant invention, but then petered out somewhere along the way. I have myself written about brands like Kodak, Nokia and Philips CDs in my older blog posts, and I am sure there are many… Continue reading Is Being a Pioneer Brand Good Enough?
In my previous blog post, I had written about the consumer durables industry and how it is cluttered and commoditised with very little brand differentiation. Well, the consumer electronics industry is one part of the large consumer durables category, and it is usually known to feature the latest technology in audio and video equipment, mobile… Continue reading Where is Brand Differentiation in Consumer Electronics?
When you consider that the Indian advertising and marketing industry is exploring a new system of consumer classification based on ownership of consumer durables according to Rama Bijapurkar who has written about it in her new book, Lilliput Land, which I have reviewed on my blog, it makes sense to look at the state of… Continue reading How Consumer Durables Can Avoid Commoditisation
With all the excessive focus on technology in the times that we live in, it’s easy for companies to lose sight of brands, and consumer connection. These days particularly AI is the focus of so much attention, that I fear at least my industry of advertising and brand communications is getting carried away by all… Continue reading Technology or Brand, Which Comes First?
We have all seen many businesses scale up and grow in their early years and become market leaders. That is to say they acquire the largest market share in the industry. That continues for a few years, or perhaps even decades, until they hit some kind of roadblock. The roadblock could be of many kinds,… Continue reading How Market Leaders Can Sustain Growth Against New Headwinds
While reading an article by Theodore Levitt titled Marketing Myopia, I came across a reference to Peter Drucker’s Principles of Management and Concept of a Corporation and I thought I must read them. Principles of Management was not available on Amazon India, but there was Practice of Management, also by him. Concept of a Corporation… Continue reading Peter Drucker and Today’s World of Work
I don’t know how many of us realize that we have already lived through a fifth of this century, mired in crises of one type or another. It all began with 9/11 in America which led to a series of ill-conceived wars in Asia. Then, we had the Great Recession from 2007-8 onwards from which… Continue reading Will the World Ever Rediscover Its Innovative Spirit?
Peripatetic Perch 