chlorophyllblog

Watch your head!

Sandesh Parkar

The exterior emulsions market in Kerala is dominated by Asian Paints. So much so that painters and dealers believe their credibility will be questioned if they were to recommend any other brand to the customer.

For a smaller player to survive in such challenging market conditions needs ingenuity and boldness. Indigo Paints began by identifying a radical niche for itself.

Roof Tiles. It then created a new segment within the exterior paints category. Roof Tile Paints. Indigo Roof Tile Paints are available in over 50 vibrant shades, in Glossy and Metallic finish.

Indigo Paints now needed a partner who could devise a sharp communication campaign to help promote the Roof Tile Paints.

Enter chlorophyll.

chlorophyll’s research threw up an intriguing insight. A Keralite is extremely conscious about the way his house looks on the outside. He wants it to stand out. Hence, he pays a lot of attention to the exterior. He uses the best paint for the walls. Curiously enough, he completely ignores the roof!

Therein lay the opening!

Now all that was needed was a disruptive idea, which would convince him that by ignoring the roof of his house he was doing an incomplete job. That an unpainted roof was ruining the entire beautification effort!

chlorophyll hit upon a brilliant metaphor. A Malayalee woman, perfectly decked-up in a rich, traditional saree and stunning gold jewellery, with shockingly unkempt hair!

The arresting visual was complemented by a tongue-in-cheek phrase that was part of the local folklore. Interestingly enough, this phrase referred to a woman’s head and a house’s roof at the same time!

Clearly, we had a winner on our hands.

Our apologies for the pun, but, last heard, sales of Indigo Roof Tile Paints were going through the roof!

What to do to make 2012 less like 2012 and more like 2012?

This blog first appeared in Campaign India magazine on January 2, 2012

- Kiran Khalap

There are two 2012s waiting for us.

Apparently, the Mayan calendar suggests the end of time: in that direction lies disorder, disintegration, death.

Apparently, the Indian calendar suggests the beginning of satyug: in that direction lies truth, togetherness, life.

If we believe the world could go in either direction, we must believe it will because we want it to go in that direction.

I personally decide I would support Direction Number Two, starting with a simple principle: having realised how difficult it is to change myself, I will not expect or look at others to change. (At 53, you tend not to tell lies, at least to yourself;-))

Having made that (easy) decision after a sip of Old Monk, I hit a (difficult) wall: what can a lone brand consultant do anyway?

Then I realise, the brand consultant’s responsibility is a subset of the creative person’s responsibility.

And then, the creative person’s responsibility is a subset of the human being’s responsibility.

An ever-expanding circle of responsibility to the profession, to the gift, to the universe.

So here goes.

2012 Resolution One: as a human being, I will strive to become aware of everything within me that can lead me to become higher than a human being. Whether through yoga or meditation or Zen or vipassana. Because human problems cannot be solved by human means.

2012 Resolution Two: as a human being, I will live using fewer and fewer resources. I will not buy or use more for the sake of fashion or belonging. Because consuming as if the earth has infinite resources is the first step to destroying the earth.

2012 Resolution Three: as a creative person, I will share my gift to create more creative people. Because the creative person’s dharma is to unite and integrate, not divide and breakup

2012 Resolution Four: as a creative person, I will share my gift in multiple ways, harnessing new channels and creating new collaborations. Because openness leads to acceptance of multiple perspectives.

2012 Resolution Five: as a brand consultant, I will strive to explain that brands are about living up to your truth, not about colorful logos and glitzy advertising. Because more brands than ever are being created without either, just by living up to a promise: like Muji and Patagonia and Cafe Coffee Day and FabIndia.

2012 Resolution Six: as a brand consultant, I will strive to support brands that make a difference, whether they support children or lost Indian music or tigers or orphans.

Will it work for me?

Guess so.

Will it work for the universe?

Of course.

So long as we remember what that word means: uni + verse: everything combined into one.

Happy 2012;-)

A new ideantity™ for NBC Bearings: flexing some grey cells!

by Rajeev Badve

NBC has been one of the most trusted ball bearing brands in India for several years.

In 2010, however, the brand was up against a peculiar problem: increasing competition from two ends of the Indian bearings industry. Big, international brands (with their larger R & D budgets) delivering a wider range with proven technology, on the one hand, and low-cost, average quality Chinese brands, on the other.

When NEI, the company behind the brand, approached chlorophyll,
we realized that the solution lay in first discovering what the brand uniquely stood for. And then in using every opportunity to communicate this, starting with a new brand identity.

In a collaborative process, chlorophyll and NEI arrived at a simple, yet inspiring definition of the NBC Bearings brand.

A definition in the area of customization and flexibility.

chlorophyll’s ideators then flexed their grey cells and created a new brand ideantity™ of two parts:
1. A visual: flexibility expressed through the letters ‘nbc’ themselves, where these letters appear to be mouldable or adjustable
2. A brand line: Flexible solutions

That’s what chlorophyll means by bending the rules of brand identities!

Chasing aspirations

by Anand Halve

This post first appeared on afaqs.com on October 17th, 2011.

As I write this on 15th October 2011, I recall some of the tragedies caused by the failure of the BlackBerry service last week.

Some users were heartbroken that they were unable to use the BBM. Others felt frustrated that they they were unable to check personal email. Yet others felt life had lost all meaning since they could not tweet. They all sounded as if the world had come tumbling around their ears. (There were a few of course whose work had actually suffered.)

But along with this, I was also witness to Kaun Banega Crorepati on the 12th and 13th. Let me tell you about two winners on those days. On the 12th, a lady named Sujata Wankhede was on the Hot Seat. Her husband Anil, who was also present, spoke of how they were struggling under the burden of loans. He talked of how helpless he felt when he was unable to give his young son a toy he wanted, because it was all they could do to pay the EMIs on the loans. Sujata Wankhede won Rs.50 lakhs and quit when she was unsure about the answer to the 1 crore question.

On the 13th, a gentleman named Rajendra Latne from Phaltan, Maharashtra, described the jobs he had done: delivering newspapers, working as a waiter in a beer bar at night, cleaning dishes in a restaurant, to get to this day when he had become a primary school teacher, and come to the Hot Seat. He won Rs.12.5 lakh

Later that evening, I saw a TVC for a telecom brand, in which a bunch of youngsters – none of whom look like they have ever had to earn a livelihood – drive around the city late at night, confronting the existential angst of being unable to find a place that was open. Followed by another TVC for a brand of shoes probably priced per pair at an amount approximately equal to Rajendra’s monthly salary. I recalled the casual conversation I had overheard recently in a premier management school about landing Rs.18 lakh annual salary jobs and a discussion in a 5-star hotel coffee shop among collegians about who had the Samsung Galaxy tablet and who had an iPad 2. No one in that group was tablet-less.

And I was struck by the contrast between these privileged children and Sujata and Rajendra. Not so much by the fact there are people who are well to do, and others who are not so well off. But by what drives the two groups of Indians. And what perspectives tomorrow’s Indians will carry.

The current 20-somethings are the first generation in India, who have parents with the economic surplus to indulge their desires. Who have grown up without the experience of having to work for something. Or to cry at its loss. Never having to hear the two-letter word, “No”. Always being able to get the newest model of smart phone. Or laptop. Or Nikes.

And then there is the other bunch of people who have to wait to get a simple thing like a new compass box. They have to work nights to get three full meals. They don’t get new clothes on a whim. They don’t have New Year’s Eve parties. And they look forward, at 25, to their first mobile phone. Any mobile phone.

As I think of the aspirations that drive these two groups, I am reminded of a story about a fox hunt in ye olde England. The fox has eluded the hounds over a long chase. But as the gentry pause after a hard ride, a hound and the fox speak to each other from a respectful distance. The hound wonders how the scrawny fox managed to out run the sleek, trained hounds. The fox replies, “You were running for your Masters’ pleasure; I was running for my life.”

Just as we have one group of people who aspire for the latest smartphone or SUV. And another that aspires to overcome their fate. Whose aspirations will take them further? One is running to fulfill ambitions of power and pelf. The other is running for their life.

The next 5000 days of communication: explained 500 years ago.

by Kiran Khalap

This blog first appeared in Campaign India on November 8, 2011

In the 1920s, Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945), created a theory of the Earth’s development: the noosphere is the third stage in the earth’s development, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881- 1955), French philosopher, paleontologist and Jesuit priest, built on the idea of the noosphere.

In the June 1995 issue of Wired, Jennifer Cobb Kreisberg said ‘Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived.’

Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fuelled by human consciousness.

It sounds a little off-the-wall, until you think about the Net, that vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running point to point through a nerve-like constellation of wires.

Of course, for those of you more historically minded, there was the concept of Indra’s Net (interesting that the name sounds similar to InterNet!), developed in the Mahayana Buddhist School in the 3rd century, which is over 1800 years ago!

What is Indra’s Net? (Check it out on the Net;-))

Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired, explains the next 5000 days of the web on TED in 2007.

He explains with hard facts why, “The web is one single machine, one single organism,” which sounds similar to what Chardin was saying.

At a very day-to-day level, it means our world of ideas and communication is impossibly interpenetrated: GreenPeace will hound the Tata Dhamra Port project on YouTube, NY Times will do a revealing piece on Anna Hazare and your personal information will be available to 30% of the world population (that’s the number of web users this morning!).

What else does all this mean to you and me, professionals in branding and communication?

1. All communication must fulfill needs instantaneously: if you the user do not get a satisfactory answer from the TV set, you will reach out for your the Net on the tablet, and if you don’t get it there, to Twitter trends…your brand had better be where the consumer is.

2. All brands are naked: whether you buy an expensive Nikon online or check out employment opportunities in Cognizant or a Gond painting on SaffronArt, you can check the claims that these brands make at comparison shopping sites from yahoo to Froogle.

There are no secrets.

In the future:

3. All media will become one: Radio, TV, multiplex, chats, newspapers, music, sms…all delivered through the Net.

And the most stunning of all:

4.There will be no mere consumers! We will all be consumers and producers at the same time (most of us already are!).

We will shape services (how many apps do you reject just by not using them? Google One?), products (Motorola used SecondLife.com to create a new mobile), logos and packaging (GAP retracted its new logo and Tropicana its new packaging, right?), hiring protocol (check out jobitorial.com or jobeehive to understand how employees rate their own companies)…which means we will be working in ad agencies but not creating advertising as much as creating connections.

You know where to connect with me, right;-)?

Changing the complexion of melamine-ware communication!

by Rajeev Badve

Unlike ordinary melamine that contains impurities like urea, Milton Melamineware is 100% pure. As a result, it doesn’t stain and wrinkle over time.

This simple yet powerful proposition got chlorophyll’s adrenalin going.

Result?
A stunning communication idea. An intriguing analogy between a lady’s complexion and Milton Melamineware’s.

Execution style? Reminiscent of skin cream communication. Category clutter-breaking.

All in all, a pure breakthrough!

The chlorophyll office: grammar & poetry

Tranquility & laughter; stillness & activity; science & art; logic &magic; yin & yang !

Click on the below link to see more of the grammar & poetry in the chlorophyll office !

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.161073423983432.37527.104889082935200&type=3&l=cb1452e861

(P.S : Please click on cancel if asked to log in and you can still see the entire album)

Civic Consciousness: the last boundary in a boundaryless world!

This article first appeared in the Sunday Standard on October 2, 2011

by Kiran Khalap

In 2009, Mumbai produced a GDP $209 billion, contributed 25% of industrial output, 70% of capital transactions to India’s economy and returned 3 out of 545 Lok Sabha members.

So the business that creates the GDP is unlikely to get the political support from any political party that is counting number of seats in Parliament.

Let us think of this as an internal boundary.

Turn for a moment to external boundaries: most businesspersons now acknowledge that all economies, and to some extent, all businesses are linked.

One estimate says, by May 2008, the sub-prime crisis put 12.7% of Americans with mortgages out of their homes.

The rest of the world is still suffering as much or more even in 2011.

Ditto with global warming.

It is becoming clear to the meanest intelligence that dying forests in one country affect water reservoirs in another.

Weather extremes have affected all cities from New York to New Delhi.

Ditto with terror attacks.

They have affected all cities from New York to New Delhi.

Even more frightening for those more interested in numbers, the losses incurred are similar: apparently the insurance and re-insurance losses arising from the 9/11 attacks ($30 to 58 billion) were close to those due to Katrina (I’m sorry we don’t have data for Indian examples).

So there are no boundaries for businesses, economies, weather, terror…

And yet, this interconnectedness is utterly useless because the world cannot act upon it together.

It can be called the Civic Consciousness Crisis (as opposed to Environmental Consciousness or Technology Consciousness)

Enter John Bunzl, creator of The Simultaneous Policy (SIMPOL) (http://www.simpol.org/)

In his words, “With the world in the grip of financial crisis and a deepening economic slump, those of us who’ve long been concerned about global warming, looming energy shortages and other global issues will no doubt be feeling even more despondent than before. To ordinary citizens all over the world, the ability to gain any traction on these issues seems inadequate and our efforts to get politicians to do anything substantive likewise seem somewhat futile. And yet the power to reverse this is, I contend, already in our hands if only we realise it.”

Here’s how Ken Wilber, iconic philosopher talks about SIMPOL, “The central idea [of Simpol] is very powerful; that is, the notion of how to link votes in one country with votes in another – how to link political action in one country with action in another.”

Will SIMPOL work in India?

Where we still haven’t managed to cross the internal barrier, the divide between money and power?

Where 16.3% of Lok Sabha candidates in 2009 had criminal records?

When the country was ranked 87th out of 178 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2010?

Where the largest number of illiterates in the world reside?

In the eyes of John Bunzl, the answer lies in our hands