Though they are pretty average in China, they have some other key geographies an segments with Audi rating 1 million cars for its 2010 target, in the US..China however, sells 1 million cars a month and they are probably ahead on hybrids also.
That brings the next moot point. Why would anyone forego his small budget and pay a high premium for a hybrid? Prius is a good story, so is the small car revolution be it BYD or Nano or Maruti. Also distribution is important.
VW chairman making his point clear in front of the Touareg hybrid..Touareg area sub saharan tribe that brave the Sahara..
However , VW launch budgets in India seem fine for a small aspiration, not a large footprint of a Suzuki. Is that just the test phase?
Social conversations from the web / social engines
The perfect add on for a google or even twitter itself…Backtype is still managing with $300k according to Crunchbase, but could easily pull $20m odd from the eventual buyer right now. The backtype product used by posterous, is quite sturdy on its own, pulling conversations from Top blogs, Twitter and possibly all social media, without restriciting it to each tweet on the subject, thus if i tweet in reply, it will show up as a complete conversation.
Social Media has affected greater brands, but Kodak’s taken it to heart in the products Kodak sells..translating the last ten years’ ‘Kodak moment’ to “Emotional Technology” transforming itself into a digital company. Kodak includes a share button on the latest slice cameras, enabling ‘tweeting’ photographs from the camera to Flickr and Facebook. Eastman Kodak is currently limited by its B2B successes but focusses on its consumer businesses for maximising the value of Sharing. They have also showcased their Emotional Technology in introducing Facial recognition so we can identify one person once from the back of the camera and catalog all the person’s photographs together.
CMO Jeff Hayzlett shows how he has taken it in Industrial inkjet printers that print 4000 pages per min to pop notes on a credit card transaction as on the other transaction documents to enable perfect matching.
Jeff is also getting popular on the web recently and appears as keynote at the Streaming Media East in May 2010
Imagine being able to say we have been associated with the Olympics since 1896. They changed strategy at Beijing towards B2B events..well he seems to be saving a lot delivering these value keynotes
And imagine having social media without a mobile browser and a desktop machine..And online/streaming videos are definitely hot
Kodak used to do $15 bn in film rolls 5 years ago, and now it does $200 MM every year in the same. Also Kodak is introducing new kiosk software for Facebook photos to be directly printed..
On average, more than 100 million images are uploaded to Facebook every day, yet most of those photographs never exist beyond the Web. In launching a new, feature-rich version of its kiosk software, Kodak will instantly make all of those pictures easily printable at retail.
NASDAQ listed comScore (SCOR) came up with the true impact of IPL on the You tube enabled season 3. Now we know there are around 4-5 million You Tube players expected on for the various SUV and Insurance digital campaigns, as also Tendulkar. Online audiences have increased by 15% yoy in January 2010 to 40 million visitors. Total minutes spent on sports sites as also page views doubled, while the no. of visits increased from 22 million in Jan 2009 to 62 million in Jan 2010
Meanwhile competitor Nielsen reported that world-wide social media usage upped 80% to five and a half hours year on year Online games and instant messaging are the other popular engagement traps where people spent more time. 205 million of the 308 million unique visitors went to Facebook in December 2009. Aussies spent the maximum 6hrs 52 mins on social sites.
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a report on traffic to Sports sites in India as the country prepares for the India Premier League’s (IPL) third season. The study found that more than 10 million Internet users at home and work locations in India visited a sports site in January 2010, nearly double the number from the previous year.
“The sports category has experienced tremendous growth throughout the last year as more Indians turn to the Internet as their first source of up-to-the-minute news on their favorite teams and players,” said Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice president for the Asia-Pacific region. “January saw a particularly strong increase in traffic fueled by the IPL3 player auction on the 19th of the month. With IPL3 set to begin in March, we expect to see continued growth at many sports sites as fans prepare for the tournament’s return to India.”
More than 10 Million Visit a Sports Site in January
In January 2010, 10.3 million Internet users age 15 and older visited a sports site in India from a home or work location, an increase of 97 percent from the previous year. Yahoo! Cricket led as the most visited sports destination with nearly 4 million visitors, up 305 percent versus last year. ESPN grabbed the #2 position with 3.5 million visitors (up 109 percent) followed by Sify Sports with more than 1 million visitors (up 379 percent). Cricket-specific sites also posted strong visitation figures including CricBuzz.com (640,000 visitors), CricketNirvana.com (523,000 visitors),KrishCricket.com (306,000 visitors) and Cricketnext (278,000 visitors).
mindjumpers.wordpress.com had the coke zero story first , if you want to go by timeline..and it is a you tube video, so we waited a while even otherwise
Facial recognition search which profiles mage attributes to find likes, has 100s of patents in most ivy league and top 10 Technology universities in the United States. Its commercialization started in 2005 when one of our friends, ojos.com / riya.com started work with a team from Stanford et al.
Well Zero is trying to make a living from discovering your own image in the mirror, a discernible likeness of the very you photographs across facebook, in an audacious experiment for the social media. Would someone mind rejuvenating six degrees experiment again?
Banks were really hit by the CARD ACt. If you watched your TV News streams last month, the CARD Act results borne out with BofA publishing its new card statements to the press. These statement show now that for an average $3000 balance outstanding on your cardd, the minimum revolver payment will take you 10 years to repay. Similarily another box shows that if you wanted it repaid in 3 years you have to shell out $300 or some such helluva number right there on the statement.
The banks have ofcourse used the sobering effect on consumers to mop up $38 million in overdraft fees from the consumers BofA customers have been complaining all year and Wells Fargo, an old hand would be still going on with its old ways. For a global traveler used to simpler processes that deny your transaction and let you check your balance without too many charges, this comes as a rude shock as well. I commiserate with the americans that need these banks and their retail accounts. Here is the European Banking Industry’s expansionory diversion that was temporarili put on hold in 2008/ 2009.
..the Southwest Airlines of the banking industry. It’s got low fees, dynamic employees who tweet often, thousands of devoted fans on Facebook and cool places to hang out. And it’s zigging in another area where other banks are now zagging: overdraft coverage
The Deutsche Bank / Bankers Trust combine failed where ING much like a TESCO, caused marketing and banking visionaries like us to put Retail Financial Supermarkets and Direct online banks with no offline real offices and branches into the picture of the future of banking.
The ING Direct model does offer hope to those who want to live without the clutter of paper, but is inherently a direct target for the FED or any other Oversight Council that might supercede its powers and FDIC gets an easy target. But, ING has worked hard with the setting up and with the regulators positioning it alongside other online offerings like Air tickets, Groceries, UPS and books..can I also get a driving licence online
ING, however, sees the transition and customer confusion as an opportunity to market its terms. “We think that with the new regulations and things like banks pressuring customers to opt-in for overdraft coverage, that the market is really coming to us,” said Todd Sandler, ING Direct head of product strategy. “We’ve seen a real shift, even in just in the past 45 to 60 days … our business is up 70% to 80%.”
A great way to find the next cars is the global auto show parade we tweeted a month ago when the Chicago auto show unfolded. Here’s the Geneva Auto show, and Chinese manufacturers are stepping out in style
An Institution with a 61 year history giving Europe a sneak peek into the World’s biggest and brightest opportunities in the digital world since 1950 when it was coined in Hanover.
The original “Center for Office and Information Technology” had now become the “World Center for Office, Information and Communications Technology”. The “Centrum für Büro und Informationstechnik” (Center for Office and Information Technology) showcases PC and telecommunication manufacturers in a hangover from their heydey with IBM and Dell focussing on Hardware Digital Technologies pitting it against Seimens and other European producers. But today’s CeBIT leads with global panels on Cloud Strategies, Digital Lifestyle and social collaboration for a smarter planet, featuring the ever spreading world of Amazon Web services in the cloud, IBM digitlal innovations, Google and the Dell supply chain latest for the cognoscenti and a lot for visionaries and digital era philosophers outside the “ICT industry”
CeBIT features 3D Audio and Cinema Technologies, Connected Living showcasing a fully networked house of the future and more…I am good to go back to my dream fair of the 70s only Google and Amazon in attendance this time!!! Spain, europe’s new Silicon Valley!! Go Germany! Catch it live at CEBIT.DE
In May the fair also moves to Australia, their add on location for the World Fair since 2002 and in Shanghai and Istanbul. A cyber police style patent raid last year may destroy the fair’s foot falls but as of now IBM is up and on at CEBIT from March 2
Expct some good product announcements as well, esp with Google on for the first time.
Ok, this blog post goes..You are fresh out of MBA school and need to show someone our marketing skill, so you write one on toothpaste brand extensions..Seems familiar? almost.
In fact, It has never been done. Though a senior consultant has written MarketSense on the illogical rush for brand extensions, commenting on her family heirloom the Crest her grandma brought home first, ha!
I would have thought more people would have written about toothpaste. As a principal, and having suffered enough at the hand of CXOs around the world, I cannot avoid spending money on toothpaste, either. And I invariably pick up a Colgate. Which one? 17 in the neighbourhood Kmart aisle, though even Wal-Mart has a lot of paste, maybe just P&G Crest.
I do not buy the logic at all. The toothpaste market is hardly $1.5 billion in the States and the same outside US if everyone is buying their hollow tube for the morning breath of freshness. In that Colgate has 17 brands of toothpaste and 8 brands of Toothbrush which are actually all the same brand. And each ‘ extension’ spends its own $30 million in the launch year. Colgate already sells one-third of the toothpaste in China despite a Chloroform controversy for it while Crest has made it too in 2009
In 1994, when I finished MBA school, it seems the buzz was for Tartar Control with Crest beating CP hands down with 16% share in the Tartar control toothpaste!
Colgate Sensitive is still spending $30 million on its latest avatar and the story still is a dentist or two recommending it etc throughout the world. Crest has recently conquered China as well, along with the premium priced Gillette mens products to ‘prove the point in quality and price’ I remember this signature product of toothpaste has also been used as part of dental convention humor in full length movies. Wasn’t it the same in the popular ‘Friends’ in the retiring season?
The $16 billion Colgate and the $84 billion P&G continue the freshness wars with no respite for the affluent and the BOP consumer in 100s of markets around the globe. Here’s what is sounds like when you praise your toothpaste - and I am quoting green:
I first tried Tom’s Natural Anticavity Fluoride toothpaste in Spearmint.
I want toothpaste. even when I sell it. not Natural, Anti-Cavity, Fluoride, Spearmint – literally biological warfare in my mouth, every time I wake up.
Seriously brand extensions are a big no-no. Even if it is squeezing the tube.
THE SOCIAL MEDIA LAUNCH
A planned study in contrast was the Colgate Wisp. If you grab hold of the viral video, make sure you listen to it till the end. They removed all the smart alt uses for the no paste no spit brush and spun a 4 for 1 Wisp offer and rafffles and free tickets around the World on your purchase. That dollar, is as tried as Granny’s pickle. really.
