Category: Marketing

MUMBAI: Channel [V], the youth channel from the Star India stable, has appointed JWT India to handle its creative duties.
 
With this win, JWT now has four channels from the Star Network in its kitty. The others xhannels are Star World, Star Movies and Star One.
 
Earlier in August 2009, Channel [V] had appointed Lowe Lintas to give it a brand facelift, thereby, helping it don its new “bloody cool” positioning.

MUMBAI: In a move to firm up its top management, Publicis Ambience has elevated Aniruddha Banerjee and Ashish Khazanchi to the newly created posts chairman and vice chairman respectively. 
 
Prior to this elevation, Banerjee was president and chief operating officer while Khazanchi was national creative director.

Said Publicis CEO South Asia Nakul Chopra, “Banerjee and Khazanchi have done an outstanding job over the past years. They are clearly our leadership for the future. Publicis is the youngest global network in India. We are already in the top three in creative rankings and now we are focused on being a top five agency.” 
 
Added Banerjee, “Khazanchi and I will certainly do our best to take up the challenge and take Publicis to its rightful place.” 
 
Both Banerjee and Khazanchi have been with Publicis since 2007. Before joining the agency, while Banerjee was with Everest Brand Solutions as chief operating officer, Khazanchi was executive creative director at Rediffusion DY&R.

MUMBAI: Dhanalakshmi Bank is shedding its navy blue look as it unveils its corporate identity makeover.

The new logo sports a purple colour that stands for wealth and prosperity. The colour, the bank believes, would act as a brand differentiator from the other pack of financial services outfits that have crowded the marketplace.
 
The bank has also changed the spelling of its name to ‘Dhanlaxmi’. Additionally, building on the eight decades of heritage, the bank has added ‘established 1927’ as part of its new identity.

Says Dhanlaxmi Bank MD and CEO Amitabh Chaturvedi, “In our endeavour to create one of the large top quality private sector banks in India, the brand transformation is a key area of focus. I am confident that the new corporate identity and communication strategy would characterize our new value proposition – relevance, convenience and clarity – for our customers.”
 
International branding and design consultancy Fitch has designed the new identity for the bank. The brief given was – ‘evolve by modernising but maintain the core value of trust’.
 
Avers Fitch MD South Asia David Blair, “With the passage of time, the context in which a brand operates changes in terms of its customers’ mindsets and values. We are delighted to be associated with Dhanlaxmi Bank at this critical stage in the bank’s history, and are confident that the new identity will continue to appeal to the existing customer base while creating excitement among future customers of all demographics.”

Dhanlaxmi Bank has appointed O&M to partner them for their advertising. The ad campaign is expected to launch in the next financial year.

MUMBAI: While the soccer World Cup takes place only in June, ESPN Star Sports (ESS) is already selling sponsorships. The broadcaster has already sold four sponsorship slots, according to information available with Indiantelevision.com.
 
While Vodafone has come on board as a co-sponsor, Nokia is an associate sponsor. Sources say Samsung has come on board as a spot buyer.

A media buyer says that the broadcaster is looking at two co-sponsors and six associates. ESS is asking for an outlay ranging from Rs 40-60 million. 
 
This time around ESS is asking for around Rs 60,000 for a 10-second spot. In 2006, the rate was much less – around Rs 25,000.

MUMBAI: Indian FMCG marketers are looking at differentiated packaging to attract consumer attention, reveals the latest study by Datamonitor.

Food packaging across the globe has seen a shift over the past 30 years. Consumers‘ tastes and preferences are changing rapidly, whilst consumption patterns are seeing a radical shift. This results in marketers having to respond to this changing environment, states the study.
 
“Innovation in product packaging is central as they offer benefits beyond just being a medium to withstand storage and distribution challenges. Riding on the rapid shift in consumer graphics and spectrum in India, food packaging emerged as the new value differentiator for the FMCG companies in India,” says Datamonitor lead consumer consultant Pinaki Mukherjee.

The study points out that in the last couple of years, Indian FMCG sector has been marked with receding margins on the back of steep increase in the input prices as well as aggressive price competition at the retailing front. Favoured by highly positive income elasticity, international brands have intensified the competition at every segment of the industry and made the task at hand for the home-grown manufacturers more challenging.
 
Additionally, the consumer graphics and spectrum in India in the last five years have undergone a sea change. Consumers have become more informed, discerning and price sensitive. Their lifestyle transformed and lifestages have become much more complex and overlapping. As consumers have become more mobile and crunched for time, they have started seeking a number of auxiliary benefits such as convenience of consumption and usage.

The Datamonitor study revealed that consumer packaged good industry has had many reasons to celebrate this revolution as packaged food rapidly replaced loose staples and locally-produced eatables. The advent of organized retailing has also brought about the ‘shelf war‘ amongst the FMCG manufacturers. They are having to plan and optimize the usage of increasingly costlier shelf spaces at the organized retail destinations.

Mukherjee predicts that the role of packaging in food merchandising will undergo a lot of changes in the years to come. India is seen somewhere at the middle of the evolution stage in terms of food packaging when compared with the developed economies such as Japan, Germany and the US. And also the sophistication of packaging in India heavily varies across different food categories.

Although Indian manufacturers have brought about a number of innovations in food packaging, such as sachet, micro-packaging, etc., it has largely taken inspirations from the more developed Western economies to find out opportunities to differentiate their merchandise from the competitors through packaging.
 
Datamonitor analysis revealed four prominent trends driving the packaging innovations, namely convenience of usage, freshness and improved shelf life, sustainable and environment-friendly and packaging as a tool to position and promote the brand.

Datamonitor predicts a multi-dimensional shift in food packaging in India in the next five years. Advanced packaging techniques and concepts such as aseptic packaging and retort-able packages, although coming into existence, are yet to make a mark in India.

“Traditionally, product packaging has not been seen as a vehicle to promote the brand while it is changing now. For example Kissan Jams, targeted at the kids segment, is now using tube packages with catchy graphics to appeal the target audience, BRU Coffee‘s aroma-lock packaging appeals to the staunch coffee lovers, who worried about retaining the aroma upon multiple usage from a single pack. In the coming years we could see lot many such examples,” avers Mukherjee.
 

MUMBAI: Wieden+ Kennedy (W+K) has bagged the creative duties of The Park Hotel and will handle the account from its Delhi office. 
 
As part of its new mandate, the agency will be responsible for recreating the overall brand of the group along with the launch of its two new properties – The Park, Hyderabad and The Park, Kerala.
 
Says W+K managing director Mohit Jayal, “We met the client and understood their requirements that are needed to develop the brand. We are planning on the details of the campaign that is expected to break in the next two months.”
 

MUMBAI: Bloomberg UTV has appointed Manoj Padmanabhan as VP sales. He would be reporting to Bloomberg UTV business head Deepak Lamba.
 
UTV Global Broadcasting Ltd CEO MK Anand confirmed the development.
 
Under his new role, Padmanabhan would be responsible for the ad sales of the channel and will look at revenue monetisation.
 
Prior to this, Padmanabhan was Ten Sports director ad sales. He was also part of the core team when Zoom was launched.

MUMBAI: Indian TV guide company What’s On India has joined hands with Ormax Media to create a learning initiative on promotional strategies for television channels.

Ormax Media has been mandated to create specialised planning tools and techniques that will allow TV broadcasters to use the What’s On India TV guidance channel more efficiently. 
 
Says What’s On India CEO Atul Phadnis, “Internationally, a TV guidance channel is used by TV networks to distribute a host of messages to TV viewers, and most importantly to promote their channels and programmes. However, we realise that a TV guidance channel is a very different medium than other media currently being used by television channels, including outdoor, print and conventional television. In India, Ormax Media will be taking on the role to enable broadcasters to use our channel better. We have also licensed certain critical templates and planning tools from our TV guidance partners across the world to enrich this process.”
 
Ormax Media director Shailesh Kapoor adds, “The context and the uniqueness a channel like What’s On India brings with it, demands that it be used differently in a TV Network’s marketing and promotional plans. This difference will apply to various aspects of promo planning, like campaign period, types of innovations, day and day-part scheduling, recency and interactivity. Eventually, the purpose is to deliver an efficient eyeballs generating plan to the broadcasters advertising on What’s On India.”
 

MUMBAI: BBDO India has roped in Arindam Sarkar as vice president, strategic planning. 
 
Prior to this, Sarkar was senior planning director at Ogilvy Delhi where he was responsible for taking care of the Coke portfolio and the Max Life business.
 
Meanwhile, BBDO India strategy planning director Sangeet Pillai is moving back to the US after completing a successful two-year stint with Omnicom‘s youngest agency.

MUMBAI: Classmate, ITC‘s Education and Stationery Products, has roped in Yuvraj Singh and Soha Ali Khan as brand ambassadors for their entire product range.
 
Says Chand Das, chief executive of ITC‘s Education & Stationery Products Business, “Classmate aspires to be the most trusted student education and stationery brand. Both Yuvraj Singh & Soha Ali Khan are vibrant icons for the youth of today. They have believed in & pursued their own ‘big ideas‘, and today, both stand tall in their professions with multi-faceted personalities.”
 
The company recently expanded its portfolio with the launch of a range of stationery products such as pens, pencils and geometry boxes.