“XYZ is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application…”

“…possibly the best radio station in Singapore.”

“…probably the best Indian curry that you could ever have!”

A new clan of pseudo-claims.

What are claims? (Not the insurance types, and definitely not the legal ones). For the non-branding junta, claims are what the word means. Marketers make claims for their brands based on the product performance, efficacy, credentialing by third party, external certification, internal R&D etc. Look around you and you’ll see claims everywhere (”Toothpaste most used by dentists themselves“, “Reduces dandruff by up to 100% and prevents hair fall“, “Best satisfaction guaranteed or your money back“, “Certified by American Health Association“, “Fights 7 signs of aging” and so on and so forth). I will not call out the brands and their associated claims, but you get the idea.

What is catching my attention is the slow movement of claim history towards more and more murky claims and pseudo-claims. ‘No product is better than X‘ translates to ‘X is as good as any other’. ‘Possibly the best‘ and ‘Definitely superior performance‘ always crack me up. Possibly? Superior? Superior to what? Your own performance 2 months ago, possibly.

And the opening claim is absolutely hilarious. ‘Almost certainly‘!!! How certain are we? Almost? But then, can’t blame the brands nowadays. Especially Web brands have their positions and superiority challenged on a daily basis. So no point wasting time, energy and resources to go for the superiority claim (one has to research into the details, do massive surveys and involves agencies to say that one is the best product / brand / service in the industry). So one would rather use a murky claim that supports and emphasizes the goodwill that Web brand has.

Like I used to say before; such great insights one gets only on my blog. Possibly the best branding blog you’ve never read.

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Click on image to enlarge. Taken from Google trends on the iPhone for India. Lets try to read the story this graph shows.

Until late June, not much was being about the iPhone in India (on Google, I mean). Suddenly, PR kicks in, news channels and TV is flooded with talk about the iPhone, blogs start writing about the steep 31k price tag, Airtel starts its holistic marketing campaigns, and finally it also reflects in search requests, with Google spiking in July and still showing high queries in August. Similar buzz can also be noted when the iPhone 3G was launched world-wide, and India has already started searching for tidbits in early June.

Even more reason why pre-seeding works well in technology, blogs and WOM. Apple would want Engadget, CNet and all other gadget reviewers to go ga-ga, early. And sustain the search volume to reach critical mass in awareness first; then with the actual launch, people are already camping outside the stores, blogs have hyped up the functionalities; Steve Jobs is smiling his way to the bank.

Another interesting observation from the Trends link: Mangalore beats all other cities (even Mumbai and Bangalore) and Gujarat tops the searches for both iPhone and iPhone 3G (Surat and Ahmedabad being the main contributors). Unlikely candidate for the geekiest state, beating Karnataka and AP, don’t you think? Or is it just a reflection of buying propensity?

[Try Google Trends. Pretty darn interesting.]

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Buzz marketing has been around for a while now, but I would like to point out one of the best examples I have seen in recent time.

HP along with Buzzcorps launched a campaign for the launch of the HP HDX Dragon Notebook PC. Very simple campaign, where one had to take part in a simple contest, answer a few questions and win one of these swanky powerful machines for free.

The brilliance of the campaign is not in the concept. Nothing new in that. The secret here is not the ‘what’ or the ‘how’ of the launch. It’s in the focused needle-pointed choice of the ‘where’.

Blogging, tech opinions and gadget acceptance is driven by opinion leaders (lead users, as we know them). These are the people who try new software, new plugins, new platforms, and are the beta-testers and alpha-testers who are always one step ahead and in the know.

Knowing this only too well, the campaign (called 31 days of the Dragon, www.31daysofthedragon.com) was launched in all the key influencing sites (31 of the best read blogs / online tech guides / product review guerillas) and the sites have different interesting tasks (from answering simple questions to posting a video of the existing PC on Youtube). Makes sure that the big guns write about the new PC, makes the visitors participate in hordes, and makes them talk about this to hell lot more people.

In short, pin-point, textbook, buzz marketing. Well executed and well noticed.

p.s: Buzzcorps was started by ex-AMD PR guy Chris Aaron who specializes in blog buzz marketing and influencer marketing. Nice niche to live in, at the moment :)

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Every time I think what more can people do, to creatively bring a win-win, there is one more brilliant marketing insight that falls plum onto my lap.

For the uninitiated, CAPTCHA is the oddly designed scramble text and numbers that one has to enter for verification on websites; to prevent auto-scripts and email-bots from entering / registering / creating accounts / running DoS attacks etc. While we usually land the boring gibberish on login and register pages, some guy actually thought of using that mindspace for advertising brand names; capturing valuable attention, and also making the user repeat it in his/her mind for filling in the web form. Seth Godin also covers this in his blog.

As users are very likely to read and type the CAPTCHA text, some people are suggesting to commercial this cryptic graphic. See good examples from Jean Yves.

Brilliant!

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The personification of something so common and prevalent, done to a degree that is almost touching, human. A simple idea brilliantly executed. And as my favorite ads do, this one made me think about it long after the 30 secs was done. And made me even blog about it :)

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My website has been a colossal undertaking, with me being a one-man team, add to that a demanding marketing job. Lot of thought has gone into each small element of the whole site, but it still remains one of my best lessons in branding and consumer understanding that I have experienced to date.

Given that I have been light-years away from coding and the like, I wanted something that would enable me to put up a website with minimal programming but maximum functionality.

In this write-up, I walk you through the step-wise thought process that went into getting to where this site is today.

First was the purpose of the site itself. As is true for any brand, it has to have a purpose to exist, and should be built, armed and positioned to work towards that purpose. I started off with two of my basic passions that would form the main pages: writing and music; and one of my hobbies, photography. The question now was whether I would write humor, as that is more readable and enjoyable and hence would give me repeat readers, or would I write about my own life, as that would be for my own future reference. Then the question of what technology to use, what would form the interface, how would I get ‘trials’, how would I get repeat readers, how will I get the word to spread etc etc.

Hey! wait a minute…

Too much chaos inside the cranium. Let me restart, and this time actually use some of the thinking that I am supposed to be good at.

1. Who? (A.K.A “Who’s your daddy!?”)

Who am I putting up this website for? If it is for myself, it will be a chronicle of my own life, my experiences, my views, but more importantly, for my own reference. If it is for the world at large, then humor would be a clear winner, or interesting, intelligent articles like this one :D

Given the fact that I don’t want to be pleasing every click-happy lost soul in the web world, nor do I want it to be a one person online existence, I decide my target group (TG) has to be a mix of both, hence defining my content to be a mix of humor and biographical entries.

2. Content (A.K.A “Yeh andar ki baat hai”)

Content is the king, it is rightly said. Good content will pull in the crowd, no matter what. Given my prolific laziness, I have to think about how much content to have before I launch so that I can drudge along as readers digest my sarcasm. Enter a timely inspiration from Douglas Adams, and I land a wonderful way to link my memories to places in Singapore with funny laughable instances, and Marvinisms are born. But then again, how many would be interested in whatever is going on in my life? So I try to nicely intersperse boring long articles between oodles of satire (like this frickin’ huge article, for example).

Along with that is the format, the look of the blog and the photoblog (Wordpress and Pixelpost templates tweaked to look the same), carefully selected pictures, the library sidebar to bring some color and halo some pseud intelligence into the blog, recent posts and comments positioned perfectly for clickability, and we are set to go!

3. The Launch (A.K.A “Uncle, yeh Reply-All aur Reply mein koi farak to nahi hai na?!”)

No rocket science this. Since there isn’t specific marketing budget to speak of, I do a blanket ping to everyone on Orkut/Gmail/Wherever. The real trick lies in actually participating in the blogosphere, discussing, agreeing to rants, joining in flames etc. Will do all that as and when I find interesting enough blogs, and with near to 1000 page visits in 2 weeks (not even counting first 2 days of launch), I’m not doing too bad even for now, methinks.

4. The Critical Connect (A.K.A “The Big F**k up” A.K.A “O! bhenc***!”)

All the while, spending weeks with PHP, MySql, testing on my own laptop with Reactor, beta testing the links and the traffic on the host, I was praising my favorite Firefox and its many webmaster plugins, that enabled quick debugging. It wasn’t until the day after launch, when I looked at the stats, that the shit hit the fan.

Mozilla Firefox: 35.4% Internet Explorer: 63.2% Others: 1.4%

I frantically opened the IE link (which must’ve been really surprised to have ever been used) and logged onto http://harishnarayanan.com and horrors! it wasn’t even close to what I intended it to be. My Microsoft-hugging majority is yet to come out of its technological Neolithic era and has thus banished my beautiful site to Jpeg obscurity. Gaaaa!

Think like your TG. To the very last stupid moronic detail.

(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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