Flipkart charges a market place fee — a percentage of the selling price of a product inclusive of a selling commission, a closing fee and shipping charges. The selling commission can be as low as 4 per cent to as much as 25 per cent, depending on the product. Flipkart proposes to do away with the commission it charges its merchants so as to enlist more of them. The company aims at having 1 lac merchants by the end of 2015, up from 30,000 now. It will instead urge sellers to advertise on the platform. It will make Flipkart more sustainable in the long run. Snapdeal owned Shopo too has become a zero commission platfor. It is mobile-only market place.
Author: Shabbir Chunawalla
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Re-defining News
Smartphone has redefined the news industry. First, news is consumed differently. Secondly, news is reported differently. Thirdly, the existing models of news are being challenged. There has to be an up to a minute news. WhatsApp and WeChat do require content that appeals to audiences on these platforms. The audience is curating their own news and in some instances actually reporting it. Younger audiences are turning towards mobile, online video and new visual formats. Older people and rural population will continue to read the paper or watch TV. News consumption is now in terms of bite size chunks — there is less text — there is less text and more video. Though the numbers of news providers have increased, audiences rely on a few trusted ones Journalists use their phones to film, edit and file from the field. A new golden age of news has dawned.
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Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is around us as a concept for the last 10 years. It is a combination of crowd and outsourcing which means getting a task done by engaging a crowd of people. It is a participative and democratic approach to get something done — be it a creative, a script, start up ideas or funding. Mostly crowd is the audience of online media. Apple crowdsourced photos taken with its phone by regular people around the world. P & G commercialized ideas sourced from individual creators. Coca Cola ran ‘ Share a Coke’ campaign with loved ones. Advertising agencies can crowdsource creative ideas. Publishers can crowdsource books, stories, novels. Crowdsourcing output commands a lot of respect as it is non-partisan and non-agenda oriented. It gets quick acceptance. Crowdsourcing done by an advertising agency augments its creative efforts. When an organization excessively depends on crowdsourcing, some may think it is devoid of ideas. Besides, some ideas thus sourced can be jaded or copied. Crowdsourcing is economical. It saves costs. But that is not the objective. The objective is to engage the people. Sony crowdsourced some ideas for its popular CID serial by asking people to conclude an incomplete story. Balaji Motion Pictures proposes to use the platform to get scripts. Crowdsourcing can raise funds for films and can be used to source scripts.
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Lauterborn’s Four Cs of Marketing
Much water has flown through the Ganga since McCarthy proposed the famous Four Ps thirty years ago — Product, Price, Place and Promotion. It was alright for an advertiser to develop a product, price it to make a profit, place it on the retail shelf and promote it to an eager consumer. The formula does not work well these days. There is product explosion. Retailers are independent. Consumers are not pliable. It is time to think of a new model.
Lauterborn suggests a Four Cs model.
Consumer wants and needs
We have to make what someone specifically wants to buy. We can no longer sell what we make.
Consumer cost to satisfy
Price is irrelevant. We have to consider the cost of time, the cost of conscience and the cost of guilt — so many other aspects apart from price.
Convenience to buy
It is an era of e-commerce and direct marketing. It is not necessary to go physically to a place to buy. We have to consider how each segment in the market prefers to buy.
Communication
Promotion is out, communication is in . It is co-operative. Promotion was manipulative.
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Prabuddha Dasgupta — A Photographer
Prabuddha Dasgupta, a photographer who celebrated nudity, passed away on 12th Aug 2012. He was 56. He was self-taught. His collection of photographs titled Women was published in 1996. It had portraits and nudes of urban Indian women. He did both the commissioned and artistic work. His photographic series Longing too is very famous. He worked with Lara Dutta and Lakshmi Menon. Lakshmi was his muse. Then he entered into a relationship with her.
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Newsjacking
This coinage combines ‘hijacking’ and ‘ news’. It is the exploitation of news for marketing mileage. According to David Scott, it is the process by which you inject your ideas, or angles into breaking news in real time so as to generate media coverage for yourself or your business. In these days of social media, newsjacking has become possible in real time. Prior to this, when India won freedom in 1947, many companies attempted to appropriate a piece of independence day either subtly or brazenly. Strictly speaking it was not newsjacking as it was not in real time, but it came closest to it.
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Google’s Restructuring
Google has formed a new parent company called Alphabet which will now oversee the other businesses such as:
- Calico which does research on longevity of life and biotech.
- Nest which proposes to introduce smart home products such as the Nest Thermostat.
- Fiber to provide high speed internet service.
- X — Labs which incubates projects such as self-driving cars and delivery drones.
- Ventures and Capital for investing in start ups and long-term tech trends.
Google will retain under its umbrella the search function, the advertising activity, Google maps, apps, YouTube and Android-operating system.
Alphabet ultimately will become the holding or parent company and will eventually report the earnings separately. It will replace Google as the publicly traded company. All shares of Google will be converted to Alphabet shares eventually.
All futuristic business and innovations sometimes disturbed employee focus and gave concern to investors. Google can now concentrate on areas under its umbrella, and the parent company Alphabet can chase opportunities in other promising areas.
The founders liked Alphabet because it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations.
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Firoz Rangoonwalla
Firoz Rangoonwalla passed away on Aug 4, 2015 at the age of 82. He is the first Indian cinema historian, and a film scholar. He played an important role in setting up the National Film Archive of India ( NFAI ) in Pune. He has to his credit an array of 15 well-researched books an cinema, and a huge body of reviews of films. He created the Indian Film Index ( 1970 ) which traces the journey of Indian cinema from 1913 to 1967. He wrote Indian Filmography ( 1972 ) and Bhartiya Chalchitraka Itihas in Hindi which chronicles the history of Indian cinema. He wrote two monographs — one on Guru Dutt and the other on Bimal Roy — for the NFAI. He was passionate about both Indian and foreign cinema. He loved every aspect of film making.
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Samsung’s Tizen Operating System
Samsung has supported an open source operating system called Tizen which works across the devices — mobile phones to wearables to TVs. Almost a thousand developers are working on creating new uses for this platform. Nearly fifty per cent applications in the Tizen store are being created in India in a Bangalore-based TDS2015. Tizen is being promoted as the ‘ OS of Everything’. Samsung has announced two new SDKs. This will enable the developers to write native apps apart from the existing web-apps. There will be graphics driven user interface and content from the cloud-based systems. A new 3D engine will enable developers to bring 3D applications to the platform. Tizen functions can be contextualized according to the user behavior. A third of Tizen developers are from India. And a third of top apps are games. The new SDKs will bring support from HTML, Javas cript and Cascading Style Sheets. All this will enable development of intuitive UIs for the platform. Samsung proposes to create an open system for Internet of things ( IoT ) based on Tizen. Using Android compatability library, developers can bring Android apps to Tizen.
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Soap Operas
A soap opera is a radio or television serial drama chiefly characterized by stock domestic situation or often melodramatic or sentimental treatment.
It is so called probably for the fact that it was formerly often sponsored by soap manufacturers. TV’s first soap in India was the 156-episode Hum Log which went on air on July 15, 1984.
Characteristics of a Soap Opera
The continuous serial has to work with a punishing schedule, normally appearing on TV once a week or more than once a week or daily. In order to do this, it establishes a base which becomes increasingly familiar to its audience, while maintaining sufficient flexibility to be able to present apparently different situations.
It provides us with the feeling of an unwritten future while giving us necessary access to the past . We are constantly wondering what will happen next — occasionally with a real cliff-hanger.
It presents us with new events which are endless variations on regular patterns and provides a range of characters which is both varied and limited. This balance of change and repetition is achieved through the organization of narrative and character.
Television calls for a lot of discipline, unlike films. It is one step ahead of theatre.
TV is such a medium that dialogues become all important factor since shots are mostly close-ups of people. When combined with the right kind of performance, good casting and good direction, we get the formula of a sure winner.
In any soap, the characters keep developing with the story. If it clicks with the audience, it can prove to be a turning point in the story.
TV serials largely depend upon certain combination of factors like good writing, good artists and good coordination.