Weekend slices: Is your soap's pH 5.5? <> Disney's hopes rest on the launch of Marvel’s weird new show <> The cloud as a driver of business innovation <> Trump’s Twitter ban may be justified, but..
As a brand, when you enter a market with entrenched heavyweights, what are your strategic choices? One way is to find an attribute for the category on which you outscore the leaders and then get enough attention from the consumer to get her to stop, think and consider the new factor when making the next purchase. Good till here. But if you are a small player, with comparatively limited resources how do you get the consumer’s attention? One time tested way is comparative advertising, a polite way of saying that you launch a frontal attack on the leader, hoping for a controversy that gives you free publicity.
Sebamed’s playbook has been perfect till date in its India launch. A series of direct ads (like the one above) attacking Unilever India’s brands. They would have betted on or hoped for 1) an immediate eruption on social media 2) an instant reaction from the leader. Both happened with Unilever going to court and the Bombay High Court restraining Sebamed’s campaigns in all media. All this accompanied with experts, trade journals, and newspapers reporting the fracas at length accompanied with visuals of the controversial ads. Just what one was hoping for.
What have they done now? Gone and released an ad playing up the pH factor with no reference to any other brand. A lot of their target audience are now suddenly well aware of pH 5.5. Like me. Who had never thought that pH factor is of any relevance to buying a soap. And what is media doing? Covering this news with the new ad in the articles. Brilliant! Like in this Mint article.
WandaVision, which debuts today on Disney+ is an important move, it is the first time Marvel’s movie studio is going into TV. From this QZ article:
Because of the shuttering of parks and theaters due to the pandemic, Disney+ has become vital to Disney much quicker than anyone anticipated. Some of its theme parks are closed (and the others have attendance restrictions) and its movies have been delayed. Disney reported its first quarterly loss ever in August, hemorrhaging $5 billion. Its lone bright spot has been Disney+, which already has nearly 90 million subscribers and is rapidly growing.
Inspired by one of Marvel’s weirdest recent comics, WandaVision plucks two ancillary heroes from the Avengers squad—the Scarlet Witch and Vision—and drops them into suburbia, providing viewers a peak into their relatively normal lives following the events of the Avengers: Endgame movie.
Disney has a long list lined up till 2023, so it’s not like WandaVision’s success is a life or death situation but it is of critical importance to see if the studio’s transition to streaming will be a smooth one.
We all know how important the cloud (you know the place we keep all the pictures we take on our mobile devices?) is to life and that it’s a huge enabler of business today. However, Gartner, a research and advisory company, believes that the cloud will be the key driver of business innovation by 2025.
Gartner anticipates cloud enabling business innovation in three core ways:
Cloud democratizes access to cutting-edge technology and will be the platform of choice for most IT services. Consumption-based pricing models and the ubiquitous availability of cloud services will provide nearly every organization with access to next-generation capabilities.
Cloud will enable organizations to connect to a vast ecosystem of partners and suppliers that offer an expansive array of services.
Organizations will increasingly use cloud services to create agile, innovative business designs that enhance their core competencies. Cloud provides opportunities for differentiation and serves as a foundation for all core business competencies, from customer service to manufacturing and supply chain.
Read all about it in this SiliconAngle article.
A host of social media platforms have either banned Trump or put him in deep freeze for a period. Twitter’s ban stands out as that’s Trump’s main mode of communication. It’s difficult to argue against the action as he has repeatedly broken the laid out rules of the platform. Two questions come to mind. The first: why now, what were you waiting for? The second: what does this mean in terms of free speech and the power of platforms?
Why now? is perhaps easier to answer. Well, to put it bluntly, all the platforms waited to be definitely sure that he would not be the President for the next four years.
The second is far more worrying as the power of tech continues to grow. Remember, this ban wasn’t brought on by some investigation by the Justice department or some such legislated body. A few 30 year-olds in California running private companies decided that they would cut off the voice of the President of the USA.
This article from Fair does a good job of bringing up the different sides of the issue.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Have a good weekend,
Suprio