Gillette goes clean

This year Gillette debuted a 30-second television spot that will go down in the annals of razor blade marketing.

Actor Brandon Quinn begins by telling the audience that Gillette sent him around the world to see how long he could shave with a single ProGlide cartridge. After gallivanting through what looks like the African Savanna, Paris, and some Asian rainforests, he tells viewers what Gillette never had: That the company's blades last up to five weeks.

Gillette has always been famously tight-lipped when it came to blade life. Ask them anything else about shaving, and you got a thorough response.

Did you know the average male takes 150 strokes per shave?

Or that men's faces include 10,000-15,000 hair follicles?

Or that 10% of male shavers replace their blades according to the calendar, while the rest of us go by feel?


Gillette never advertised blade life because it never had to.

The brand, owned by Procter & Gamble (PG), grew into the leading men's shaving line not because its blades lasted forever but because they were better, period.

They were better because Gillette spent more than anyone else to make them that way -- it didn't hesitate to cough up $1 billion developing the Mach 3.

And Gillette never mentioned blade life because it was better if the consumer didn't know.

By not knowing exactly how long (or short) a blades' lifespan, the customer might replace it more often than necessary.

Moral of the story : 

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt

-Abraham Lincoln

                        

                                     

                      

                       

 

                      

Copying,sharing and the dilemma

Recently i posted a status on facebook (5th june 2012) which goes as " A pizza of radius "z" and thickness "a" has a volume pi*z*z*a  #Funmath ".

One of my friends added a comment "nakum sir na profie maa thi copy karyu 6ene..... (i.e. You have copied from nakum sir's profile right ?)" to which I responded "Wait lemme see his profile !"

I usually don't add any of my teachers to my profile because i find it quite awkward when their home page has pictures with my inappropriate tags.

When i visited his profile,it was actually there but in a pictorial form.When detailed,i saw it was shared from a page called "Don't Play With Engineers . . . ././././"(Yes,all new words with first letter capital and 4 dots and 4 ./ combinations). So i visited that page which was a under the BOOK category.The page had all soughts of funny jokes and stress-busters at its best.

There is a android app called friendstream which syncs many pages and many accounts all at one place and i usually find good shares over there.

When i saw the word COPIED,i was brooding over the difference between copying and sharing and while discussing this with my roommate it turned into a duel related to patents.

For example : If i update something which is a sort of invention or a patent item and if i post it on social networking sites,it is obvious to get shared.Some people may also call it COPY for lack of a better word i guess.Now suppose if a viral marketing guy , markets it with just a wee-bit of modifications,would that violate the patents ?

Many people would think that mitesh has gone mad but guys if you relate this thing outside facebook,on technical terms,it may cause a huge loss to the original person giving the birth-idea.It can also be discussed in terms of linux and windows but that would be a headache to do here.

In today's world,any idea has its root in some research or the other in past.If this is how it would have been accepted then there would be no inventions and betterment in technology.Only drugs and chemicals produce new and completely original compounds these days.

Moral of the talk : The Pdf file defining Patents ACT also has some of the unknown patents violated !

Coke and Pepsi

In the 1980’s the two big soft drink giants Coke and Pepsi were in business in USA. Both companies had good management.

Every meeting of the Pepsi and Coke teams in their conference hall used to be towards taking over the market share of each other. Very soon they realized that they were not making any headway in boosting their sales or profit.

But Coke team realised their mistake and changed their strategy. So Coke changed their agenda now to get their own sales and profit to increase by 0.1 % every month. In fact, their endeavor now was now to compete against their own capabilities.

The Coke company was initially succeeding in achieving their goal of 0.1 % increase in sales monthly. But after a few months the company found that even this small 0.1% increase in sales becoming difficult to cope with.

One day the CEO of Coke thought to change the strategy once again. He did a market survey to find out what is the total consumption of fluids of an average American.

The results were amazing. Each American drinks about 1.5 liters of fluids including water, tea, coffee, beer etc a day on an average and out that only 30 ml was soft drinks like Coke and Pepsi.

Now their conference was concentrating only on how to increase this 30 ml quota to at least 300 ml to start with. One of the executives suggested that they should make Coke available to the people when ever and where ever they felt thirsty or wanted to drink some thing.

To this end, Coke put up vending machines at every street corner. Coke sales were up more than ten times from then on and Pepsi has never quite caught up since.

Moral of the story : “Challenge and compete against your own capabilities, if you want to excel.”