wat an IDEA sirjee

Long back when i first saw the IDEA Cellular ad campaign of Abhishek bachan, i was quite impressed with the concept. The Series was based on a social upliftment platform. Sometime later i came to understand that the total series was conceptualized by none other than Balki(he also has the movie Cheeni Kum to his credit).


While Jr.Bachan added the much required glamor quotient to the ad, it was the engrossed message which paved the way for the Ad from On screen to off screen discussions.

I liked the one wherein the Village head brings in a new initiative into the village that required everyone in the village to be addressed by his/her number (which obviously was an Idea Cellular number, the brand for whose survival has this ad been made)instead of their respective names.

A week back when i heard that Government of India has brought the idea from Reel to real life implementation by specially constituting a Department to start allotting Unique Identification numbers to every citizen of India. So from here on if you come across more than one Vamsi in your life, i shall be different from them by way of unique ID.

Something on similar lines to US's Social Security numbers.

While initially i was not sure how gud progress would this effort make when we are referring to a country where we already have many numbers starting from Roll numbers in class to Driving license to mobile numbers.., etc

At the same time since this Initiative shall be spearheaded by Mr. Nandan Nilekani to prove his mettle with the humongous task ahead him my expectations raised a few notches high.

Wat an IDEA Sirjee.....

I want more for my Money

Today while standing in the Queue at Bigbazar to make the payment, the person before me was murmuring with the billing fellow over the Quality of the goods that are being sold at the store. I didn't bother to checkup which brand made him so upset but all the while i was making the payment i was pondering over the Consumer Vs Producer perspective.

A Consumer's version of "I want more for my money"..VS "Iam giving you the best" of the Producer

While it is true that few of the consumer goods currently available in the market are not meeting the standards of durability, it would also be worth while to emphasize the role of consumers as well.

Consumers today no longer want the same product again and again. They are looking for new options and wide range of choices to choose over. This preference by consumers has sparked off an intense competition among the producers of consumer goods. Producers have expressed their anguish at various public forums that there isnt any guarantee that Consumers who buy a product once will for sure return to purchase the same product again. Since they knew their competitor is trying to woo this consumer with another interesting feature.

Also the latest innovations in technology have drastically cut down the Production times and the introduction of concepts like Lean, Sixsigma and JIT-Just in time, brought in the importance of maintaining less inventory as a result producers no longer maintain huge quantities of same variant of product as they used to do a decade back.

While Consumers complain that they are not being given their value for money in terms of durability the producers are trying to reduce costs day in and day out to attract more consumers towards their product.

For example many Shopping malls have now started to the usage of Paper bags in contrast to plastic bags which were used earlie. Though Plastic bags have longer life as consumers wanted more durable products, but the time they take to decompose is longer and they contribute to environmental pollution leading to global warming.So producers have come up with novel concepts like Jute and paper bags.

Also these products once they wear out, are subjected to recycling, to be processed as raw material for production purposes without leading to any wastage. This particular effort has paved the way to conserve and effectively utilise our natural resources and is also economical to consumers.

There are many Standard bodies which oversee this process and certify that a particular product is worthy enough to be spent the amount it is being quoted to. Hence there are tough standards to be complied to bring a product into the market. They ensure that a product is not touted to be used beyond its durability to ensure consumer safety.