Lost and Found & marketing Bakery Cafe :)

In some ways I think I am helping create a lot of electronic WOM (word of mouth) for the Jawlakhel Bakery Café. As it happens to be close to my school, and as it happens that me and Annie (my best friend) are avid coffee lovers, we have been frequenting this café. So I was there last week, Annie and me too engrossed in our girl talk waiting for someone to take our order. I was over the moon talking of my new found love (I will post a blog about my trip to Calcutta and what treasure I have finally found there).

The waiter came, and he asked us to move to some other table since a bigger group was coming in few minutes, we obliged. We looked around and then walked downstairs, made ourselves comfortable and ordered. My regular tall Cappuccino arrived , while Annie had her shot of Espresso. Espresso tasted terrible that day. We talked to the Floor Incharge and he replaced the coffee.

So in an hour, the twittering girls left, and left behind a new blue water bottle. I have been hooked to this water bottle since I am back from Cal. For one whole day I looked for the missing bottle. Looked everywhere at home, asked the attendants at college to check if there was any bottle, wailing to get home… finally it dawned on me, Bakery!

Day after, we walked in Bakery again, this time to discuss about our MIS project. I immediately cornered the first waiter I saw and elaborated about my 1Litre, blue capped, transparent bottle with Spirit written on the body. The guy shuffled few drawers and gave me a blank look. I asked him to go down and check, since I had shifted downstairs last time and had coffee there. This guy in turn asked me to do myself the favor and go down and check. So, I said, ‘ I am going to be upstairs and get some coffee, and I would like to get my bottle back when you get the check’. He got the message. I got the bottle.

Hmm… two important things…. the coffee replacement, and the bottle I found back. Makes me feel good about Bakery. However, why aren’t the staff a little more polite, concerned and at your service????? Restaurants are frequented not just because the food there is good, or the coffee is awesome… the whole point is the experience.. Here in Nepal I think we are missing in selling experience while we keep serving the creamy Cappuccinos in not very tall mugs!

Brand new!

Philip Kotler says, ‘a brand is an offering from a known source’. We generally trust things of which we know something about. Like, when I went to the FSA (Festival South Asia, film fest), I chose to watch films that were about Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Srilanka etc, because I know these countries. My high school geography lessons make it easier for me to a point on the map and tell , there is Srilanka. No wonder, we humans tend to relate to things, people or places that we have heard of or known much easily than of things we do not know about.

But is it essential that we just believe if we know ! Well, people believe in branded products, because the product as a brand has made a promise and strives to keep it.
Is it this promise that makes us go brand crazy? I wonder what my four year old cousin means when we pesters his parents to get him a ‘Hot wheels’ car or a ‘Kurkure’ or ‘Junior Horlicks’!

While on my small shopping trip, I noticed bill boards, Romanson, Rado, Christian Dior, I wondered what was so appealing, the way the names were written, their logos or how the name sounded. My father would probably swear by Titan, my uncle would be all for Rado and my mother would covet her Rolex. All these watches have been giving them the right time so far. As I wonder the satisfaction beyond quality that a brand actually gives comes from where, I take a call from my Nokia cell, look at my Longines wrist watch and drive back home in my Maruti 800, still wondering what charm brands hold!

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....

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!

Let’s spread the word!

Now that I have taken the blogger’s oath to regularly come up with (hopefully) interesting accounts, what comes to my mind is who are my readers. Like a good marketing student, let me chart out my marketing program. WOM ‘word of mouth’ stands first in the list. And Melanese must have done his worth of job :-)

I have recently noted with some amount of interest the opening of a branch of Rameshwar at New Baneswor. This eatery has not had to spread the word, possibly because fragrance travels faster. The ever busy road, where you need to honk the horns to travel through the maze of pedestrians seems ideal location for this eatery. It is just next doors to a local cinema hall, and I presume, it offers its delicacies to movie viewers before and after the movies! Now, if I were to model my advertising based on this eatery, I should have someone put up the link to my blog in someone’s site which sees a lot of traffic. Or shouldn’t I?

But for now, spread the word. I would be surprised if I see new slogans on tshirts that look something like, Log on to http://vidwata.blogspot.com. (just kidding!!!!)

We are open!

It has been long since I wrote something. Well, last night when I was about to fall asleep, I wondered if it were possible that thoughts that ran wild in my mind could be translated into words digitally, such that when I woke up I would find a nice mess of a story, which I would gleefully edit.

However this is not to be. I read it somewhere that like a shopkeeper must open his shop daily and wait for his customers, a writer must sit down and muse while waiting for words that would come out to become stories. So, let me open my shop!

Well, since I suffer from a disease called unpunctuality, I wonder how regularly will I be opening this shop of mine. But as they say there is lots of power in motivation, I hope Annie’s frequent inspirational notes and Melanese’s bickering will keep this business an ongoing concern.

So, let me take an oath, that next time I read a book as stirring as ‘Tin Ghumti” (by BP Koirala), watch a movie as engaging as ‘Monalisa Smile’ (starring Julia Roberts) or draw out philosophical meanings while attending MIS or TQM lectures I will share my musings with you.

KIT and Keep reading, the shop is going to stay open now!

Coming Soon!

Vid is getting up and started with the new blog business....