Ideas We Believe

When the COVID-19 pandemic cast its shadow on the global arena, the fuss was about healthcare, crisis-mobility and supply chains. Each among them held a threat to the existing polit-beareau of international politics, from international organisations coming under fire to the rise of right-wing politics over the globe, could be seen as a precursor to the summer of 2025, which has seen 5 countries go into a direct war with one another. And the cursed thing about wars is they breed quickly like a festering infection. While the theory is that the pandemic might have been the trigger for these global skirmishes, I posit that it was only a catalyst in the larger political cycle.  While the 2000s had seen massive army deployments around the globe, the 2010s were a calmer decade. Led by the democrats in the US, and the rise of liberal politics around the EU. And as we have now been made more aware of, those were a decade of political correctness, DEI and more so of anti-inequality. The pock...

Two recent campaigns deserve attention from marketing enthusiasts, one of Campa Cola (reenergised by the Reliance Group) and of Tata Sampann's species. The challenges these two brands face are too distinct from one another. Campa, on the one hand, aims to fight the global brands like Pepsi and Coca-Cola, whereas Sampann looks to create a market in indian spices that has been dominated by local players like MDH and Everest. However, their strategies have something in common: getting the distributors to stock more of their products on the shelves. Campa is offering the distributors twice the margins, while Sampann is leveraging its vast portfolio to make stocking only Tata products a win for the distributors. Image credit: Economic Times To understand why this is happening, and what makes this interesting, one has to look back on the history of marketing, more specifically the shift from a push to a pull-based marketing, where the focus of the brands shifted from pushing their produc...