Greetings for New Year 2012

A stunning testimonial from our client, Purvaai in UK

Brand Ahoy! (Part II-The hunt for the perfect logo)

Final Logo of Purvaai:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Tarangini

In my time at TiE-Boston, the Boston USA chapter of a worldwide business-networking not-for-profit organization, I had worked in Marketing and Communication.

Each year for the annual conference, we commissioned a brochure. This work had been awarded three years in a row to an advertising and design agency based in Pune by the name of Studio Blossoms. They kept getting repeat orders from TiE-Boston because they were just that good!

In that time, the proprietor, Prasad Rasal, had become a friend. When we realized we needed a logo for Purvaai, I knew I wanted to go to Prasad and his team at Studio Blossoms. Their work had been exemplary and they were very, very good about understanding client requirements. Luckily, my partners Sonali and Priya were open to that.

When I mentioned to Prasad that we’d started our own business, he was genuinely happy for us and asked what he could do to help. I explained what we needed- a logo that would stay on with anyone who came into contact with us, one as beautiful as the products we would sell.

As always, he understood perfectly and was super-supportive. So much so that he gave us a break on his regular charges for these services! This was, to a small start-up like ours, a huge deal.

All the gorgeous logos we had to REJECT to pick the best one!!! Criminal waste, we say.

Within a week or so of us having communicated our requirements for a logo, Prasad’s very efficient and extremely talented team had already created no fewer than SEVEN logos!

All of them were beautiful and very relevant to our positioning. They had interpreted the brief so well that all we needed to do was select our favourite. Of course, again, like with the brand name, this was easier said than done. But we managed- the winning logo you can see at the top of this page.

Just like Prasad and Studio Blossoms, there are many others; Photographers, PR professionals, Designers, other e-Commerce retailers and many more, who have helped us in our journey towards becoming successful. Some have offered price breaks, others advice we wouldn’t get anywhere else. One of the things we hope to do through this blog is also thank all these individuals and hopefully get the word out about them. Purvaai supports other small businesses and entrepreneurs.

How to make a great marketing pitch?

1. Understand the client: An optimum amount of time invested in research based on your gut feeling of the business to be generated will help in the long run to make a great pitch for a prospective client. The main objective of pitching is to break the ice and make inroads in the competition which already exists. One has numerous resources available nowadays to do the research of the client, their competition, the product or the services they are offering, standing in the market, global and local scenario etc to name a few. The more you understand your client; the better will be your pitch.
2. Understand client’s objective/s. What the client hopes to achieve through their product or services is the key question. Understand their target audience; the message they want to pass; the time lines; the budget and constraints, if any.
3. Approach: What the client wants to know is how you can help them achieve their objective with the available media options at a reasonable cost. One needs to show them how an agency will help them meet those goals. Your pitch should make it amply clear that you offer unique services and strategies that will help clients move closer to their set goals. They should be convinced about your invaluable contribution in making their objectives achievable in the best possible way.
 4. Method: ‘Simpler, shorter and precise’ is the key while presenting the pitch. It could be presented in person or through email depending on the time available. It is advisable though to make an effort to present it in person for that way you are in the best position to explain the pitch with a greater impact. A professionally enthusiastic presentation is the key for success. You have to balance the virtues of communication which will ensure the client’s interest stays or grows till the end. Drive the objective point home and it’s good to talk about the commercials at later stages.
5. Finishing Touch: Don’t oversell! Crispier and professional approach in making client understand the positive effects your association will bring is important. If possible, quote some case studies of success stories you made possible and let them understand that you have an online portfolio which they can access and evaluate the strengths of further. You can also use this pitch as an opportunity to highlight your specialties and list all services that you provide. An unobtrusive follow up through mails is recommended, but it also depends on the individual client’s taste. If interested, they are sure to get back without much effort from your side.

(The views expressed here are only guidelines from blossoms, a brand and media consultant in Pune, India, as per their experience in planning communication strategies for their clients. The results will vary with user or agency applying it and depending on the nature of client interacting.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is often disturbing to learn/read about accidents to young and old acquaintances which otherwise would have been averted if Helmet was used. The price they pay is high and hence an attempt to make realise the importance of wearing the Helmet while riding on a 2 wheeler.
Issued in public interest by blossoms

"A Brand is a complex symbol. It is the intangible sum of a product's attributes, its name, packaging and price, its history, reputation and the way it;'s advertised. A brand is also defined by consumer's impression of people who use it, as well as their own experience"
-David Ogilvy

I reared cattle to sell milk, got in poultry farming, silkworm farming, then turned a motorcycle dealer, an Udupi hotel owner, a stock broker, irrigation equipment dealer, an agricultural consultant, a politician and finally an aviation entrepreneur - struggling, falling, rising, falling, rising again and taking off.
Capt. G. R. Gopinath, Simply Fly, A Deccan Odyssey

'Entrepreneur is one who creates wealth where it did not exist earlier by creating a new market and a new customer. The create something new, something different, they change and transmute values; and on a size and scale that will impact society.'
Peter Drucker

Why you need a branding specialist?

90% of businesses aren't born with million-dollar funding. So what makes any entrepreneur successful in cut throat competition? Every enterprise has to have an idea followed by a plan to execute it. A research on the target audience, their taste, the geographical demand, the incentives offered and the value of the deliverable needs to be properly done. The burger we eat for Asian taste would have to be different from the European or American taste. McDonald’s introduced local items like McAloo tikki and vegetarian French fries based on public demand.

KFC spiced up its fried chicken using local spices and more pepper than its traditional recipe. A similar consideration applies to understanding the psyche when you are going to introduce cars in different geographical locations with respect to their usage, terrain etc. All wheel drive or four wheel drive is necessary in hilly terrain and bad weather. Compact cars are more popular in heavily congested Asian countries due to lack of space and buying power of the average consumer. Neglect considering your target audience and your product is doomed even before it hits the market!

For a product/service to get popular without any concrete marketing plan, it may take more time than imagined however good the product may be. A quick and better way is to use different available mediums to advertise the goodness in the best possible fashion. Hence the need of a solid business strategy and a plan doubly ensures the success of the product/service to be offered.

Some reasons which are attributed to failure of any enterprise which otherwise could have been successful:

Lack of business plan
Weak initial funding
Lack of branding initiatives
Poorly executed plan
Launching at the wrong time
Failure to develop the brand
Weak employee participation
Logistics roadblocks
Not fulfilling the brand promise 

If you are an entrepreneur about to introduce a new product or business idea, you need a well researched business plan. This will take into account several things such as your brand promise, brand strategy, product/service attributes, target demographic, market positioning, pricing strategy, promotional or advertising strategy etc. Without this concrete roadmap, you are like a ship without a rudder and will be soon lost in the sea of countless nameless businesses that are launched every day. A good business plan will allow you to develop specific milestones, financial projections etc. so that you can plan how long you can sustain your business before it starts adding to your revenue stream.

 

Some beautiful quotes of Warren Buffet

 Price is what you pay. Value is what you get...

The first rule of Investing is don't lose money; the second rule is don't forget rule #1...

I don't care where someone went to school, and that never caused me to hire anyone or buy a business...

Predicting rain doesn't count, building an ark does...

If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians.

We can afford to lose money - even a lot of money. But we can't afford to lose reputation - even a shred of reputation.

Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

In the business world, the rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield...

The Start-Up of You

The rise in the unemployment rate last month to 9.2 percent has Democrats and Republicans reliably falling back on their respective cure-alls. It is evidence for liberals that we need more stimulus and for conservatives that we need more tax cuts to increase demand. I am sure there is truth in both, but I do not believe they are the whole story. I think something else, something new — something that will require our kids not so much to find their next job as to invent their next job — is also influencing today’s job market more than people realize.

Look at the news these days from the most dynamic sector of the U.S. economy — Silicon Valley. Facebook is now valued near $100 billion, Twitter at $8 billion, Groupon at $30 billion, Zynga at $20 billion and LinkedIn at $8 billion. These are the fastest-growing Internet/social networking companies in the world, and here’s what’s scary: You could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma. They just don’t employ a lot of people, relative to their valuations, and while they’re all hiring today, they are largely looking for talented engineers.

Indeed, what is most striking when you talk to employers today is how many of them have used the pressure of the recession to become even more productive by deploying more automation technologies, software, outsourcing, robotics — anything they can use to make better products with reduced head count and health care and pension liabilities. That is not going to change. And while many of them are hiring, they are increasingly picky. They are all looking for the same kind of people — people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can’t, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever.

Today’s college grads need to be aware that the rising trend in Silicon Valley is to evaluate employees every quarter, not annually. Because the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution means new products are being phased in and out so fast that companies cannot afford to wait until the end of the year to figure out whether a team leader is doing a good job.

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day — more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer? Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow? And can he or she adapt with all the change, so my company can adapt and export more into the fastest-growing global markets? In today’s hyper connected world, more and more companies cannot and will not hire people who don’t fulfill those criteria.

But you would never know that from listening to the debate in Washington, where some Democrats still tend to talk about job creation as if it’s the 1960s and some Republicans as if it’s the 1980s. But this is not your parents’ job market.

This is precisely why LinkedIn’s founder, Reid Garrett Hoffman, one of the premier starter-uppers in Silicon Valley — besides co-founding LinkedIn, he is on the board of Zynga, was an early investor in Facebook and sits on the board of Mozilla — has a book coming out after New Year called “The Start-Up of You,” co-authored with Ben Casnocha. Its subtitle could easily be: “Hey, recent graduates! Hey, 35-year-old midcareer professional! Here’s how you build your career today.”

Hoffman argues that professionals need an entirely new mind-set and skill set to compete. “The old paradigm of climb up a stable career ladder is dead and gone,” he said to me. “No career is a sure thing anymore. The uncertain, rapidly changing conditions in which entrepreneurs start companies is what it’s now like for all of us fashioning a career. Therefore you should approach career strategy the same way an entrepreneur approaches starting a business.”

To begin with, Hoffman says, that means ditching a grand life plan. Entrepreneurs don’t write a 100-page business plan and execute it one time; they’re always experimenting and adapting based on what they learn.

It also means using your network to pull in information and intelligence about where the growth opportunities are — and then investing in yourself to build skills that will allow you to take advantage of those opportunities. Hoffman adds: “You can’t just say, ‘I have a college degree, I have a right to a job, now someone else should figure out how to hire and train me.’ ” You have to know which industries are working and what is happening inside them and then “find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs it’s differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us.”

Finally, you have to strengthen the muscles of resilience. “You may have seen the news that [the] online radio service Pandora went public the other week,” Hoffman said. “What’s lesser known is that in the early days [the founder] pitched his idea more than 300 times to V.C.’s with no luck.” 

(An Article by Thomas L. Friedman)
 

Designing a Logo/Corporate Identity

The most famous and recognizable logos in the world like MacDonald’s, Nike, Shell, Mercedes Benz or Apple can be branded on a horse’s butt. What I mean to say is, a logo need not be a complex network of many design elements in order to reflect the values of that organization. The success of any organization lies in garnering an emotional response to the products/services they offer by virtue of their commitment or promise with respect to their commercial value. The growth depends on how well they interact with their market and interpret and improvise on the deliverables. A logo plays a vital role if your promises to your clients are fulfilled.

 Logo Designing is part of a big branding exercise and we will not endeavor to understand it from a larger perspective over here. blossoms’ intention is to showcase the impact of a logo in creating the brand image of any organization through various designs the creative team developed over a period of time.

Gone are the days when companies like Adidas and Rolex came out with their identity decades after their marketing success. Today, every budding entrepreneur thinks of a business card with his iconic logo symbol in the initial stage itself.

Even though your branding philosophy will decide your fate in the competitive world, you cannot neglect the need of a proper logo which is the face of your company. Ideally, a marketing or branding strategy decides the logo rather than the business one is into. Otherwise, what would a star(Mercedes) have to do with a premium car brand? In short, the logo should be able to convey a bigger message instead of immediately hinting at the product or service offered by the organization. If it is possible to gel both together, nothing like it.

If you are in the process of creating or revamping your logo, feel free to drop a line at mktg@studioblossoms.com and let us try to bring the positive attitude of your organization to the world. Like any other business, logo designing is best left with professionals.

Potpourri

What kind of service are you interested in?

Tell me your experience both in terms of a client and a buyer :) It's so apt and forces one to think on the priorities :)
In my decade long years in business development at 'blossoms' there are numerous accounts when people want all the superlatives at a peanut price. There are penny wise pound foolish types who can go on spending on the utter hopeless things just to ensure that the happiness of bargaining supersedes the utility and durability. It is imperative to calculate the optimum of the three factors with the virtue of your loyalty towards a brand, the rationale behind its periodic demand and the competition on the same levels of expectations.

A Young Initiative Building Strong India:

It’s hard to imagine the steely resolves of petite and beautiful Asira and Eesha Chirmuley, who happen to be daughters of my good friend -Yogesh Chirmuley who works with Draft FCB, Mumbai and resides at Thane. I have met them on couple of occasions and found them almost like any other youngsters who are energetic and full of life but without any concrete goal; the way probably most of us are/were...living life as it comes. Recently, one article which covered their feat appeared in Hindustan Times (newspaper) was shared within our friends on their achievement at this tender age. I am sure it will prompt us all to do something within our budget, means, strength or capacity to do our bit for the society we live in.

Potpourri as we all know is a mixture of dried flowers, herbs, spices etc. that infuse the air with their unique fragrance. Wiki gives some more information here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potpourri).

Potpourri is also a medley, a cultural hodge-podge or a miscellaneous collection of diverse items.

When I think of potpourri, I first think of the huge bowl sitting in my bathroom, adding beauty to the surroundings and much needed fragrance to the air. The bathroom is the one place in our lives where we are generally undisturbed, and at perfect leisure to indulge in any day dreams! You can stare in the mirror for hours together without receiving any sniggering glances, or just soak in a thousand suds, or sit and read a book/magazine…whatever. This place then is a veritable ground for all sorts of ideas to appear, take any form sans inhibitions, and be released onto the supersonic jet of our imagination.

 

Many of my most creative, off the cuff ideas have been born while staring at the big bowl of potpourri. As I work toward creating a more spa like feel to my bathroom, I add items that make me forget the craziness outside. The noise and chatter gradually recedes and a soft tune plays. Plants, scented candles, and books – a much selected diverse collection that I love to thumb through again and again.

There are loads of thoughts coming to you from peoples’ desks, or maybe by the fireside, library or garden. Potpourri brings you those unfettered ideas that can only take shape in the most basic and functional part of your home – your bathroom!!!

Needless to say, there is another very effective and proven way to make room for creative thinking…You guessed it right…MEDITATION. But this is more talked about and less practiced in our life. I sincerely am planning from many months, without much success, but am sure one day the potpourri will come out from meditative state with eternal bliss attached to the outcomes.

Waiting to hear from you if you share my inspiration place...if not do share any of your exciting anecdote of 'that' Eureka moment/s and where did you chanced upon them?

A sweet love story in the making (Post It)
Hopefully this is a TVC for Post It. Awesome. Effective and Emotional. Conveys the brand characteristics very properly. Do watch it. It's sweet