news 19.01.11

• RBI and SEBI want Financial stability and Dev. council (FSDC) to focus only on financial stability.
• Lavassa Corporation may be imposed with heavy fines and then left to use.

Ad world scenario

It’s not first time that we have seen the litigation charges from one giant on other on some fancy advertisement claim. Recent case of Reckitt Benckiser again ignite the issue of brand war in India. In last decade all FMCG giants like HUL, P&G are faced intense competition and only price war cannot be the differentiating factor so companies often goes for false claims like no. 1,extra vitamin content etc we all seeing it all but this short term advertising tactics is often marring the long term strategies as company reputation go on stake if these claims are challenged in the concerned authority .Who can forgot the big fuss about P&G and HUL. Last year data shows almost 22% rise in these types of cases and this kept ASCI(Advertising Standards Council of India) quite busy these days. But the receiver is end user customer in all these cases as in the time cases get solved the company get the much wanted false lead over the competitor . These kinds of cases are not limited to FMCG sector only but other sector like Telecomm, Education and Insurance are catching in number of such cases. We can hope soon strict standards will be made for false advertising and we can see pure qualitative advertisement like good old times, the cycle will get itself repeated. Customer has to be careful from these false ads and take help of services like consumer forums and other sources to know the reality, only a educated smart customer can change this trend in India.

The Changing Way

HUL has set up booths where its each of the 981 managers will have to spend 15 minutes to listen to public, their suggestion and grievances. HUL treated itself as good as their brands and had become arrogant over the time, Unilever's CEO Paul Polman is giving due importance to HUL as India is a developing market and HUL's share in the market has dropped. They are now focusing more on the consumer . They are visiting stores and cleaning and arranging them in a way to achieve more product visibility and in the way increase sales. Over the last year HUL has relaunched 80% of its product portfolio. They are even giving consideration to all its project the equal importance, whether it's a 10 cr  or 1200 crore( detergents).HUL has earlier given privilege to those who were good at ideas not to those who are good at execution , but now things are changing for them. As a result the launch time of a new product has reduced from 18 months to meager 3 months and 40 innovations in last 10 months where it took 10 years earlier to reach this mark.

Email getting old

Recent trends show that the social networking sites are becoming more popular and replacing the classical email sites. Studies from leading research firm like Gartner and Comscore expert shows that the new generation consisting of age group between 16-21 is scrapping up the email format as they simply don’t have the time for composing, editing etc of email. They just tweet or change status on facebook when they want to communicate for them email is not cool. This can result in serious business trouble for the gmail, yahoo and rediff as if facebook launch the email services they can probably capture more than 20% market of these three giants. But this is not the end of email it is just the transformation phase and to survive email has to augmented by use of more application and more intelligent tools like priority inbox, tagging on base of projects, personal usage etc. New business model in field of advertising and formal communication will emerge at faster rate than you can imagine. To survive these giants have to change making email more interactive and cool for genY. The opportunities are vast in email field as studies shows that email user base is constantly increasing at 100 million per year rate .Facebook will definitely have eye on that figure as they want to capture this new market without interception of gmail or yahoo. Some purist still assert on language and other etiquettes which is lost on social networking sites, but they are forgetting the basic rule of time ,time changes everything even the language. So get ready for new avtar of your classic email on the next morning.

• Govt. admits it can't tame price devil as the vegetable prices are rising dramatically.
• nafed and NCCF to sell subsidised onions by importing.
• States urged to exempt horticultural products from APMC act to remove bottlenecks in movement of fruits and vegetables.
• Infosys Q3 net rises 14.2% and total revenues in last quarter Rs.1780 crore.
• Cabinet secretary KM Chandrashekhar has favoured FDI in multi-brand retail saying investments in improving distribution network would help control prices.According to industry estimates 40% of farm produce i.e. worth Rs.50,000crore becomes waste, every year. It is expected that foreign retailers would bring in adequate capital.global practices leading to an improvement in distribution system.