Monday, September 26, 2005

Kite Festival and Customer Orientation

Yesterday, a few of us sat down for a cuppa at the Cyber Kitchen (Jawalakhel). We ordered our coffee and began our chitchat. Our talks steered to one of the recent issues,that of 'changa chet'. Changa meaning KITE and changa chet meaning, someone cuts another person's kite up in the sky. As you see, Dashain is round the corner, so kites are on mind and sky, both! We looked around at the decor of the Cyber Kitchen, which like every year, marks the Kite Festival with a festive gaiety of its own. There were lovely kites hung all around.

After hanging out for a while, as we made our ways out of the cafe, Shalin smiled to me and said, if we could take one of the kites as a souvenier. These kites with Cyber kitchen's signature!

THe marketer in me sprang up, lets test these folks... how customer-oriented are they? lets see their culture? or lets find out how deep customer runs in their veins!! So, Bravo, I ask one of the guys there, if I could take a kite.... Hmm...'sorry mam but we dont have permission to give you one!'....

Hmm...now if you were this guy, what would you have done....

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

On Consumer Behavior and Communicative Scent

Women want to be desirable ?

During one of the lectures in the Consumer Behavior class in my grad school, we had a short discussion on what women really want? I will give you a short background on what brought forth this topic. We were dealing with a case of marketing communicative perfumes to both men and women. Communicative scents are basically scents that will attract the attention of the opposite sex. The product was called Sexette. The group presenting the case, positioned Sextte, as a ‘Groom yourself’ for men. While they suggested a slogan that read, ‘Feel special and make yourself special for him’, for the perfume targeted at women.

I was slightly skeptical (to put it mildly), here were a bunch of will-be marketers, who thought that a woman would like nothing less, but to be desirable to men. While men had other things on mind. Women were invariably one of them. I drew their attention to a popular tv commercial of Axe deodorant, that is currently giving fundas on seducing women. Call it my prejudiced thinking, but I feel women are always very interesting to men. Artists paint beautiful women, poets sing odes to them, and Shakespearean geniuses write on them! Now before I digress, let me throw few questions, to ponder upon.

Sexette, as the name suggests is about sexuality, how come a man would respond differently to it than a woman?

Would not the whole purpose of Sexette as a communicative scent be defeated it for men it meant becoming moisturiesed men, while for women it would do wonders?

How can we judge the natural instincts of men vs women?

Don’t men worry about being attractive to women? Not all men are gays!