We all have heard/studied/read about the Product Lifecycle(PLC).The concept says that Product like a human being has a finite life.It grows, matures and then dies.

Lets take an example.Floppy Disk is no longer available now but it was a hot cake at one time.Even till 2001-02 floppies existed in market.The product just died.

Brands on the other hand don’t exactly follow a life cycle.Brands can be immortal unless they commit suicide.Brand and product are closely related.A brand is nothing without a product or service but brand can evolve over the time.

Continuing with our floppy example,Sony,Seagate all had their floppy disks,but the brands didn’t die after the death of floppies.

Sony today is preparing market for BluRay.Seagate is a market leader in hard disks.

The brands lived.Coca Cola is a brand that is immortal.Brands who realized that they need to evolve survived, rest have died.

There were brands in India like Campa Cola,Gold Spot etc,today they have died and are no more.

Either they were killed by the bigger brands or customers rejected them.If Campa Cola could have gone into a slightly different beverage market,they could have survived.Parle did survive as a brand.Today its a big brand.

Thums Up as a brand could not be killed even after Coca Cola tried its best because the consumer demanded the drink.

Some years back,there was a series of TV commercials in India for a brand called Home Trade.The ads featured Sachin Tendulkar,Shah Rukh Khan,Hritik Roshan but the brand was never heard of after the ads.The brand died instantly.

So do brands die ?

Yes and No,Brands are not created by TV commercials or campaigns,they are for the consumer/customer to test and trust.Once a name is in customer’s mind,its a brand.But the life of the brand would be decided by the fact whether customer sees the brand as a friend or a foe.

e.g. Whenever Maruti comes out with any new car,people accept it and trust it because Maruti as a brand is a friend to many target customers.Same is the case for Apple as brand.

Many would argue that once a brand is established,its immortal.But its not the case.Luna was a brand which was highly valued and popular, today the moped is no longer in production nor any other vehicle is produced with a Luna logo or brand.

So Luna is alive in history and not in reality.

Brand unlike a product can live for ever,if managed properly.Here comes the role of Brand Management.

Brand can undergo a physical change too.Like many brands keep changing their color,the look,the identity or image.This ensures freshness and long life.

Coca Cola,Nike,Adidas,Google,Microsoft are kind of brands which will ‘never’ die(hopefully) because they have evolved over the time,adding more products to their arsenal.

If a brand keeps evolving,it will never die,It can’t.

But it can commit a suicide.

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© 2010, TMSBee. All rights reserved.

So whats the offering ? Is it just another ‘me-too’ touch phone in the market or is it THE phone we had been waiting for ?
If it has Google’s name attached to it,it ought to be good.The initial reviews are good.



Analysts say the phone(to be sold directly to consumers) is not expected to dramatically alter the carrier-hardware vendor relationship the industry relies on, nor is it likely to yield a revenue windfall in the short term, though executives said it could be profitable.

Google plans to use what it calls a “superphone” (the first of many types of smartphones that it will make) to expand its reach from the PC to the mobile world and ensure its online products and ads get prominent placement on a new breed of wireless Internet devices.

The highly anticipated Nexus One, which marks the first time the 11-year-old Internet search titan has designed and sold its own consumer hardware device, could provide Google with a viable challenge to the iPhone and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry.

After iPhone came into the market,it witnessed many of its touch clones(not cousins) bombard the market.Each and every cell phone manufacturer(even Nokia) came up with their own ‘iPhone’.

All phones without keypads,rectangular in shape,with normally one (or max 2-3) button were common in the market.

Now the next question is Whats the price and Where is it available ?

The Nexus One is available “in large quantities”  at Google.com/phone. An unlocked GSM version of the phone that will work in most countries is $529.

Google is also offering a subsidized version of the phone – also unlocked – through T-Mobile for $179. The service plan offered by Google is 500 minutes/unlimited SMS/unlimited data for $80/month. T-Mobile’s termination fee is $200, and some users might be tempted to buy the T-Mobile version and terminate immediately, paying just $379 for the unlocked phone. Google says that users terminating too soon will be charged the full price of the phone, however. But even the T-Mobile version of the phone can be used overseas on trips by slipping in a different SIM.

Google will ship the unlocked version of the phone to customers in the U.S., U.K., Hong Kong and Singapore. In the Spring they say they’ll add a CDMA version of the phone through Verizon, and set up a European store with a carrier plan via Vodafone.

U.S. users can also use the unlocked phone with AT&T, although the phone’s radio isn’t able to use AT&T’s 3G network.

The bad news for India right now is that its not available in India.

The Nexus One is an important milestone in the smartphone market. This is a software company, frustrated with making compromises with hardware manufacturers, that has taken the product bull by the horns. HTC makes the phone, but the branding is mostly Google and it’s clear that they directed every aspect of the development of this phone. It’s Google’s vision of the perfect Android device, from the huge and beautiful screen and massively fast Snapdragon processor to the software elegance of Google Navigation, Live Wallpaper and the Voice Keyboard. When combined with Google Voice there is no phone on the market today that can touch the Nexus One.(Source : TechCrunch)

After reading and researching about Nexus,it seems to come up as the biggest competitor for iPhone.The “smartphone” market which was witnessing a battle of sorts between iPhone and Blackberry is set for a War now.

So how would Nexus One fair in the market ? Would it bite Apple or RIM where it would hurt them the most ? Is Microsoft observing from the flanks ?

Lets wait and watch.

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© 2010, TMSBee. All rights reserved.

Lets have a look at this commercial of Windows 7 which came much before its release.

Just give attention to words the kid says in the end ,” I am a PC and more happy is coming !”

This reminded me the ever going war between PC and MAC depicted mostly in the PC Vs MAC ads from APPLE.

After seeing the above ad i was really waiting for the Apple’s response to Windows 7 and a few days back they responded and in what manner !
Just check out the ads out of the many ads released by Apple MAC.

BROKEN PROMISES

The first Ad ‘Broken Promises’ is awesome.I could not help but laugh on Microsoft.Microsoft has done this in the past.Windows 7 is mainly being positioned and perceived as a better replacement for Vista.The reviews,developers,testers every one is comparing Windows 7 to Vista.No doubt they are praising 7 but its not a paradigm shift in the OS market.Windows 7 is quite similar to Vista as in look and feel and many other features.
Its more compatible,more secure and more stable but is not much different from Vista as far as an average windows user is concerned.Now with 7 users are again on cross roads whether to stick with current operating system (as many people did when Vista was launched) or upgrade to 7.Here is where Apple strikes hard.
The next ad in the series does exactly that.
They say when you need to upgrade,redo everything,move all your stuff,then why go to a PC(windows),why not a MAC.

TEETER TOTTERING

This ad shows a windows XP user moving to a MAC.

Yet another ad MAC shows that people are moving to MAC rather than Windows 7.

PC NEWS

Ads and jokes apart,I and majority of my friends are Windows Users.I currently use Vista and would definitely try Windows 7 as soon as i get the chance.

Windows 7 can give Microsoft what Vista could not.Lets wait and watch.

Meanwhile enjoy more Apple Ads here and CNET.com review which says

The good:Strong design and Microsoft don’t always go together, but they do in Windows 7. Users might take a while to get used to the new taskbar and Aero Peek, but they’re a pleasure to use.

The bad:Performance is still hit-or-miss in Windows 7. At the ripe age of seven, Windows XP still performs better in some categories.

The bottom line:Windows 7 is more than what Vista should have been, it’s where Microsoft needed to go. How much damage Vista did and whether Windows 7 is enough for people to finally abandon Windows XP are questions that nobody has the answers to right now.

What Say ?

© 2009 – 2010, TMSBee. All rights reserved.

Gmail was far behind Yahoo Mail.Google as a website is number one in the world but Gmail is not even close.

I was caught offguard.I thought all my friends use Gmail.Majority of people whom i know use Gmail.So Gmail would be far ahead .But Reality was different when i saw the stats.I also found this table below which had the growth rates of various mail sites.

Gmail is rising but still Yahoo is way ahead.

I dont remeber when last did i use yahoo messenger.I chat with everyone on gmail(gtalk) mostly.

Why are stats not consistent with the observations ?

Then i was reminded of Orkut which was a rage in india in 2006-07 in india but then i had heard that no one really uses it in US or Europe.I had heard Brazil and India were two countries where Orkut was being used the most.So i thought is this the same case with Gmail.

So when i researched on Indian data about the mail giants,i found this interesting piece of stat.

According to data released by Komli Media’s online audience measurement and analytics platform ViziSense.com, Yahoo Mail, with 18.3 million unique users in India, leads the email category in the country, followed by Google’s Gmail which has 17.2 million users in the country. The other three leading email service providers in India are Rediffmail, MSN Mail and In.com Mail with 6.5 million, 4 million and 913,000 users respectively.

This data still gave me some hope that my observations were not that bad afterall.The global scene is different from the indian scene.Here in India Gmail is just equivalent to Yahoo Mail in terms of users and seeing the growth rate of Google it soon will topple yahoo from its numero uno position.

I think in countries like US and European nations,Internet and Email revolution started way back than our country.So yahoo mail and Hotmail being early players in the mail market are still strong.Normally people maintain only one free email account and maintain it over the years.

Whatever the standings,I was actually surprised and pleased to know these facts about Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

Is this what is called the First Mover Advantage ?

What Say ?

© 2009 – 2010, TMSBee. All rights reserved.

In the search engine market,google sits supreme with 65% market share.Yahoo and MS (bing) currently share 28% of market share.Rest of the search engines like askjeeves.com,dogpile,AOL etc etc take whats left.

Bing arrived on the scene with a bang.All tried Bing atleast once or twice then came back to good old Google.

I was watching a show on CNN yesterday in which they were asking a lot of people on roads, in malls and offices about bing,other engines and GOOGLE as well.Nearly all  replied in affirmative to Google usage.

Google means search and Search means Google.Even the title of this post conforms to that.in other words Google has become our second nature in the big online world.

Googled,googling are all used verbs now.Google itself  is a verb(Google is a word in Oxford dictionary) .The sentence like ‘Please search this topic on Google’ has become ‘Please google this topic’.

Even Xerox can’t match the brand recall Google has acheived.

Microsoft has been trying a lot to beat Google.They tried hard with MSN but failed and now Bing.They have left no stone unturned to take Google on in this search engine market.Bing has made a good start.

But what Microsoft has to realize that their fight is not against Google or in other way they are not fighting google in a boardroom but the war is inside a 6 inch battleground,the user’s mind.(a famous line by Al Ries and Jack Trout goes something like this Marketing wars are fought in the 6 inch battlegrounds).

Can they remove the word google from the minds of millions and replace it with a Bing or a yahoo or a bingahoo?

A question that only time will answer.

© 2009 – 2010, TMSBee. All rights reserved.