Dreamzzz, Desires n Desperation...: November 2006

Nov 23, 2006

Some more perfume ideas..

Flattered by the idea of perfume for innovators our professor asked that how you will find that how many innovators are in the country or how many people are going to innovate in future? Will it be something like you'll sell your perfume to only those who will wear a T shirt with "I'm an Innovator" printed on it? Well, that was one doubt which we were not able to clarify.

Some of the suggestions that came from him were:
Perfume for professors:-> If we can come up with a perfume for innovators then why not a perfume for professors or a perfume for shop-keepers or one for non-teaching staff members.
Offensive perfume;-> Which smells like shit and can keep people away from you.

Well the idea clicked with me and I started thinking about some of the buyer segments for which to positioning this perfume. Well to start with:

Film stars:-> Specially for those stars who keep saying "No Media Please" and who are too shy to brush the public and media gathering aside and be rude. (I am not talking about Salmaan Khan, his biceps and his famed driving skills are good enough to scatter the media person everytime he shouts "No Media Please"). They can now have their say without actually saying anything.

Item girls:-> I think Rakhi Sawant will be a celebrity customer or perhaps not (Some people say that with all that makeup on, she already smells like **** you know what). Well the problem is that when these girls say "no" that means "more". But yeah she would have saved herself a "Mika" by putting on that perfume. But wait! who will invite you to a party then? Well we have an idea of hosting theme parties where only regular users of this perfume are invited. Don't worry we promise who's and who's of film industry and sports world and some top corporates.

Indian Cricket stars:-> Will be another set of regular buyers as it will make the fast bowlers of the opposition team bowl from a longer distance than the regular 22 yards. It is evident that even seniors players like Sachin and Dravid are finding it tough to face the chin music from the even the slowest of the fast bowlers. Well this will keep the bowler 10 yards behind and they will get some more time to watch the ball. It will also keep the fielder's away so no chance of getting caught out. But yeah the problem is that you have to wear a nose filter to stand at the non-striker's end. Okay! we have a solution. We will give away nose filters for free for some time.

Daughter in laws:-> This could be a good gift idea as a daughter in law can give it to her mother in law to make a bold statement " Don't come anywhere close to me or I will start wearing this perfume".

Well, these are my crazy ideas about this offensive perfume. I am dying to hear my friends to critically evaluate my ideas and send in their suggestions. I am still to come up with a brand name for my offensive perfume. Friends! wat do you say??

Nov 20, 2006

Crazy, Crazier and Craziest..

Customized toothpaste:-> Buy toothpaste in four different tubes each containing one special ingredient like fluoride, calcium,whitening agent or a dental cream. Buy any number of them by your choice and mix them to get that freshning morning breath. Wait, toothpastes are no longer for morning brushing only.

Toothpaste for diabetics:-> Sugar free or non sweetened toothpaste.

Toothpaste for smokers:-> Which makes them feel score that whatever harm tobacco does on their teeth, there is one toothpaste which is going to take care of that.

Perfume for innovators:-> Wear this perfume and feel like an innovator. decide for yourself what you are going to innovate.

Perfume for achievers:-> To make a statement which expresses your personality and for those who oozes confidence. This will be a perfume for those selected few.

Soap with a hole:-> I don't know exactly what was the basic idea but people are claiming that this soap will be easy to rub and will last longer as very less water can stay on the soap.

Soap with goat milk:-> These soaps are popular in the best but for price conscious Indian customers they are still a distant dream.

Soap for water scarce area:-> Will save water as will give little lather (not convinced by the idea actually.. to save water you always have the option to skip bath. Ask any person who has outlived Punjab's winter he must be knowing how to conserve water.

Seasonal bathing soaps:-> A soap for every season. WEll it's a crazy shot at leveraging the four season advantage of India and selling four different kind of soaps but then how would one know when to switch soaps?

Bollywood fan club calling card:-> Call Amitabh Bachhan and talk to his recorded voice, leave a message. Or sing a birthday song to your favorite actress Aishwarya Rai. You can now live your fantasies with the bollywood calling card.

Calling Card for farmers:-> Send these people the local mandi rates, EMI information and local gossip. Farmers will be very loyal to you if you succeed in doing even a small value addition.

Refrigerator-AC combo:-> Both are almost identical in working. But then the challenge is to integrate the two. You open the door it's refrigerator and when it's closed, its an AC.

Wondering what is all this? Well, these are the inputs from the segmentation exercise for our marketing course 1. Morale of the story is: People can go crazy, if given a chance. And they can go crazier if they are marketers.

Nov 15, 2006

Tournament Effect..

We often wonder that we were too good in school and then somehow not able to sustain the same level of enthusiasm and energy during the later part of our career. We pile on a bundle of dreams thinking that life will always be like this. I will get the same people to compete with for all my life. After entering a college with student population much bigger than the combined strength of your school you still think that this is almost the same set of people. Competition will be the same. Slowly the feeling sinks in that life has changed and pace of the change requires you to revise your goals. Now you don't want to be the topper and you will feel satiated even if you manage to get the second rank. What happened? Has your competencies changed? The answer is No. Why? well keep reading.

You are in college where you are the okay with academics but excel in extracurricular and especially good with quant and verbal ability (yeah! you know what I am talking about). You read one article in the daily editorial and feel confident that someday you can make it to the CEO level and MBA is the route to it. You feel confident about the pedagogy followed in MBA. Case discussions, presentations, group discussions and group exercises, you relate all this to your college life and you think you have enough substance in you to make it big in MBA. You target the CEO position of a company of your dreams. Well, you enter a MBA course. For the first few days you find the going easy but then you start feeling that something is not right. We call this "WHAT YOU THOUGHT IS NOT WHAT YOU GET" effect. You slow down to analyze yourself and revise your goals. Now you target the CTO,CFO, COO or any other higher level position ( just below the CEO). Well slowly and gradually, after two or three revisions of your goals, during the start of your placement season you will feel happy if you bag an entry level position on Day 1. Well, it seems logical that you should be realistic but then have your competencies really changed? Again a "NO".

What is this which makes us feel smaller and insignificant over a period of time? Well, the answer is "TOURNAMENT EFFECT". The explanation of this effect is that we are so absorbed with ourselves that we never realize that the stage is getting bigger and bigger. And people around you are becoming smarter and smarter. You are sharing your stage with some of the handpicked people who were perhaps the best in their own comfort zone.

For MBA students this effect has really a meaning. To excel in life you need not always look inside you, you have to be an excellent reader of the environment also. You can not take it for granted that if you were good at something in the past it's an advantage. Well it's rather a disadvantage as it will act as a mindblock for you. Continuous improvement of your skill sets is the key. After all, you are not in your comfort zone. Well, the moral of the story is respecting your self for what you are respecting others for what they are and if you have to revise your goals/targets then please don't feel bad. You can always blame this “TOURNAMENT EFFECT".

Nov 11, 2006

Mania of 43..

It has been a month…30 and thankfully not “43” days (k…not sure but, it doesn’t hurt to hope can it?) Since I’ve been haunted by number 43 more than once a day, my disbelief in numerology is getting shattered and ubiquitous reappearance of this number in my daily life is making me think about it and dedicate a post to it. A search on google reflected zero results and it did not help much to sideline my worries about the mystery of number 43. I get a phone call; I hang up and see that the call timing is 8 minutes 43 seconds or any number of minutes + 43 seconds. I talk about this to one of my friends and then the next car that passes ahead of us has its number plate marked 20”43”. I look at my computer clock and find it’s exactly 43 minutes past some hour. I check with one of my friend randomly and ask her the time. She says it’s 2:43 now.

Don’t know what the connection between me and 43 is but, it feels wonderful to think that “43” used to be our teen code for “Love you”.

Nov 7, 2006

What Ram Jethmalani wants??

This is the question all those people are asking who walked side by side holding candles and demanding Justice for Jessica. I hope this name “ Jessica” is still fresh in our minds. The two slogans which brought India closer this year were “ Youth for equality” and “Justice for Jessica”. While the former was self made the latter was coined by Media as they were falling short of news stories in those un-eventful early summer months.

Anyways, the fire slowly died out and what remained is the long procedures of filing papers, court dates, appointment of public prosecutor and then hiring a legal defendant. The story got much bigger this time as the person who is going to defend Manu Sharma’s case is undisputed king among the criminal lawyers. Ram Jethmalani has this knack of being in news for all kind of reasons. When he was in ministry he made it into news several times but then his position in BJP was slowly taken by young and brilliant lawyer Arun jaitley and the frustration out of this made him target leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The move is well calculated now. The fire inside him is slowly dying. The young bunch of Yale and Harvard educated lawyers have this capability of delivering a bigger better show anyday anytime. The magic is fading away and this is his chance to prove that he is the best. To choose to defend Manu Sharma is like making a statement that public was completely wrong and they have no rights to decide the fate of a person in the court of public when the case is lying pending with the court of law. Manu is innocent and Jessica was murdered by some non-existent person or Jessica might have provoked him to shoot her or he was already in a drunken state and he didn’t know what exactly he did in that state. Whatever may be the verdict, at-least I am not going to buy this argument that Jethmalani is doing this for a big fat cheque that Manu’s family is going to write to him at the end of the “FAIR TRIAL”. The only other probability is that he wants to prove this thing to the world that a candle burns brighter just before it dies out. I don't know exactly what motivated Mr. Jethmalani to take up this challenging case but well in the court of public perhaps you will no more be an ideal figure.

Nov 4, 2006

Getting started once again..

With placements of the final year batch getting almost over now, for first years, its time to jet, set and go once again. It’s the time to be prepared to meet the hard life ahead. The three day’s discontinuity from studies has given us enough time to sit back and reflect over the past four months that we have spent slogging for grades. I am wondering that I took four months to realize that grades don’t matter at all. What matters most is the flair and penchant for work and the way you integrate your academic knowledge into your action. Most of the students who got placed on day 1 and landed the best jobs are those who had this hunger in their eyes and for some reasons fighting for grades do not excite them all.

Anyways, the three days layoff followed by a busy Friday evening and now a seemingly bitchy week ahead (with shit load of work, case presentations and quizzes), I think it’s the best time to think over that final decision that What I want to be in life. But then my gut feeling is that for a person as confused as me, he has to wait until the need arises to update his resume once again.