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A lot of the coverage of business growth and opportunity in ‘New India’ concentrates on the emerging middle class, but some of the most interesting and fast-growing businesses are those targeting lower income groups.
On Friday, Orange launched their contactless payment system, Quick Tap, in conjunction with Barclaycard, on the Samsung Tocco Lite handset.
There are at least ten other distinct brands involved in Orange’s leap into new territory. Nine are working together:
In Orange here’s a brand, driven by developments in technology, assuming a new role as banking provider – virtually, as far as consumers care.
Doesn’t sound quite right, does it?
My eye was caught this morning by a story on the Financial Services Club website about Nationwide Building Society working with BT to become ‘more agile’.
BT has published a downloadable case study about the contract which is available here.
Nationwide has signed a 7 year agreement with BT Network Services that is planned to have the effect of ‘aiding business transformation while reducing costs’.
If the deal goes ahead, it’ll be Microsoft’s biggest ever acquisition. A more skeptical write-up in the Guardian has analysts apparently
“shocked” at what they think is a “substantial overpayment for the company”, but it’s not surprising to hear Microsoft may be enthusiastic about committing to Skype.
As Google Apps and a throng of popular cloud computing productivity services grow their presence and market share Microsoft is wise to be looking for a solid technology with which to entrench: Skype is the dominant player in its space, with nearly as many registered users as Facebook.
The UK Government is hoping to crowd source ideas for policy and cost-cutting through Facebook.
Cameron and Zuckerberg discuss the initiative in this video (warning; not for the squeamish)
Cathryn Sleight urges marketers to “light more fires”
Source: Marketing Week | Author: Joe Fernandez | Published: 29 June 2010 13:20
“Taking chances and lighting small fires using digital media can really help add extra value to brands in the long run, without the fire having to catch and go wild. Done correctly, it has the ability to increase brand affinity and engage audiences wherever they are. These advances are making the digital space much more exciting,” she said.
We agree about lighting small fires – the concept and the language used to describe it – but it isn’t just about the digital space…
Why do we like this campaign?
It’s surprising, contemporary, experimental. From a big brand, but feels handmade, authentic and real.
The ‘messy edges’ of a community-based initiative of this kind should provide some very interesting learnings; insights and hints for the future that traditional market research and NPD wouldn’t necessarily uncover, at least not as quickly.
Have a dig around on the Pocketgame site. What do you think?
How do you clean up a mess like this?
This doctored logo above is one of the entries to a competition that Greenpeace is running to ‘rebrand BP’. There’s an articleabout the competition on crowd source website www.IdeaBounty.com.
A powerful, damaging image (and some of the Greenpeace competition entries are that) can distribute at dizzying speed, and potentially do enormous damage along the way.
It’s a fact of life that people – for better or worse – are going to ‘play’ with your logo, advertising, strapline, whatever. One way or another, we’re all going to have to deal with that. If we want to have sucessful brands.
What should BP do next? Change their logo; lose the green? Front it out?
There’s an interesting article in Adage today: ‘On-the-Fly Advertising Swiftly Becoming More Commonplace…’
‘On-the-Fly Advertising Swiftly Becoming
Here’s an excerpt: ‘in a growing number of cases even the biggest marketers in the world, such as Procter & Gamble Co. and Unilever, are adjusting creative and media plans on the fly within days, weeks or even hours based on changing events or the shifting tides of social-media feedback.’