Water Forward is not the only example where social network is used effectively for fund raising purpose. Nine out of ten non profits in USA is now present in social network. Therefore, social communication has found a space in social network just like corporates and multi-nationals. And it makes total sense. As more and more people want to engage instead of just being told to do something and as more people spend more and more time in social networks, thats the place to go to initiate fund raising and create social awareness.

On January 13th, volunteers from 83 countries converged in Estonia to launch World Cleanup 2012 which is the largest and most ambitious rubbish and garbage collection movement till date. Again, social media played a big role in it.

Social network is a handy little way to build up a steady group of followers and volunteers who would like to be involved in their favorite cause and do their part of being a good samaritan.

Among the Hollywood style filmmaking, remakes and reboots are a popular and common choice. Think about the suffering Batman franchise. In the wrong hands, supported by aweful storytelling and some glaring mistakes (the infamous nipple suit of Batman being one!), Batman almost suffered a tragic death in the mid 90s. But thanks to the Christopher Nolan led reboot, the Dark Night has risen again and is now pretty much leading the way for all super hero film reboots. Next in line is the Superman franchise.

There is a powerful lesson in there. Despite the best interests and truckload of money, your brand can simply wither away. Blame the timing, blame the luck, blame management or fickle consumers. But thats the fact. But if you are clever, and if the timing and strategy is right; dead brands can be brought to life. Brands that made such a heroic turn arounds are Apple, Nissan, Hush Puppies, Saab (still in the middle of rebirth after General Motors bought it and gave back its identity – a car that is made of jet plan standards), My Space (Again in the middle of the turnaround after Justin Timberlake and his comnsortium bought the brand) etc.

While other brands talk about consumers looking for a distinct identity and differentiation, Red Bull is probably the only one who understood that. Red Bull is the biggest anti-brand brand, the coolest thing that happened this side of atlantic for a long time, its underground despite being over the ground. That creates a close connect between Red Bull and its notoriously fickle target market: teen agers. Teen agers strongly identify with its slightly irreverant positioning and the brand has reached iconic status thorugh its association with all sorts of extreme sports like cliff diving in Hawaii, skate boarding in San Francisco, dirt biking in London etc. Here is a brand that definitely bucks the trend and lives by its code of taking the plunge. Also unlike other FMCG brands its not extending its line.

Red Bull understood that Generation Y is immune to commercial messages. Thats why it identified a very simple grassroot level marketing strategy – find out college kids who are opinion leaders in their circle, supply them with free drinks and allow them to throw parties where they sample the products among their friends. This simple mechanism allowed Red Bull to carve out a market in an extremely competitive beverage market.

One brand. One flavor. One can. In an era of advertising and innovation; its almost unthinkable how a brand of this magnitude can be built without advertising with just one offering. But Red Bull is definitely a living proof that if your strategy is right, everything else will fall into place sooner or later.

Last month the IBM Institute of Business Value published a report entitled ‘From Social to Social CRM’. The report surveyed 1000 consumers about the reasons they interact with companies via social sites and then compared this with the results from surveying 350 business executives on why they thought consumers followed them on on social media. The results highlighted a perception gap that can only mean companies are missing out on direct revenue opportunities.

The reality is social media followers WANT to be monetized – they are after deals, promotions and discounts. Unfortunately most business executives are barking up the wrong tree by thinking that conversation with the brand is what drives people to follow them. In reality it is quite the opposite. Of course this represents a massive opportunity. If brands build up large social followings they can distribute social offers into this community and the research suggests that commercial results will be healthy. You can’t get more focused social ROI than campaigns focused on revenue. Marketing executives need to meet consumers expectations when they follow companies on social sites through providing regular deals, coupons and social offers.

In the past two decades video gaming industry has off-loaded its small industry status and emerged as a $56 billion dollar industry. It has crossed newspaper, magazine and music in order to become the second biggest entertainment business; behind only movie. Now the movie numbers are inflated because it includes the DVD sales; which is driving the growth in film business. But even then, in a very short time video game industry has become three-fifth in size to the film industry and quickly closing that gap.

A lot has changed in gaming industry and the biggest strength of gaming industry is that unlike the other industries (Newspaper, music etc.) gaming industry embraced those changes and actually thrived on them. Going back, two launches probably shaped the industry future more than anything. One is the launch of Sony Playstation back in 1994 which made video gaming an extremely adult affair and no longer a matter of kids and nerds. The second would be the launch of Nintendo Wii which made video gaming popular among women also. Amazingly, the average age of gamers are now over 35 and a significant percentage of them are women (to some extent biased number due to mobile games like Angry Birds which is very popular among women). With these two mega events behind, the majority of growth in video gaming is coming either from online games like Farmville and World of Warcraft. Or they are coming from mobile games like Angry Birds, made by a finnish company called Rovio who houses only 55 employees. In a way, online and mobile is the future of gaming. Although gaming industry is still earning most of its money from selling console based games, the growth in future is coming from online and mobile.

The lesson to learn for modern marketer: Embrace change or get hammered by it. Also, the video gaming industry is an excellent example of staying one step ahead of consumer trends, cooking up awesome innovations, adjusting to the rapid pace of technology and preference and ensuring cool execution putting consumer at the center of everything.

Just like Internet was never the end of Television as a medium, online is not the end of off-line. In fact, the future is a sort of hybrid, a mutually beneficial and dependent co-existence at times. In that future, online firms will complement their online existence through off-line activities. And ofcourse, brick and mortar firms will go virtual to open up a new source of targetting customers.

A classic example would be how E-Bay is using off-site pop up stores/acts to drive traffic to its website.

An interesting phenomenon about online firms is the difficulty in categorizing them. A few years ago Amazon was an online book store, Apple was a computer maker, and Google was a search Engine. But Amazon is now into tablet manufacturing and content providing. Apple if at the forefront of defining digital revolution through i tunes, i pod, i phone and i pad. And Google is an omnipresent force in handsets, cloud computing, music store and software development.

This tells us that the classic way of defining boundaries for businesses no longer apply. Even more importantly, you cant really categorize who is your competition and who is not in a black and white manner anymore.

But the process that Pixar and then Disney crafted to perfection has reached a snag. The problem with this is the risk associated with it. It takes millions of dollars to make and market a movie with no guarantee that it will succeed. On the other hand it takes a few thousand dollars to create a fantastic mobile game/app with a like-able character. So its a better bet to create a mobile game based character, make to so addictive and popular that it creates a huge fan base and then make a movie which will be sure sell among the fan base and beyond. This is a better way of going. And the trend is catching on. Rovio, with its extremely popular Angry Birds game is following this reverse trend. The new game from Disney (Where’s my Water?) starring a love-able googly eye aligator called “Swampy” is already creating a huge fan base. The next logical step would be TV shows and movie. So the creator of the trend itself (Disney) has reversing the trend. Thats what is called staying ahead of the game. Kudos to Disney.

We have been exposed to two drastically different style of Masterchef. One being the Australian version and the other the American version. Lets bite into both.

Masterchef Australia is the anti-thesis of everything we come to know of Reality TV. No biting comments. No harsh judges. No back biting. There seems to be an illogical amount of good feeling and camradarie between the contestants and judges. When one person wins, the other person smiles. We are definitely not exposed to this kind of reality tv. And the interesting part is, despite going against the conventional wisdom about reality tv, such absence of drama and fighting does not strip the program of its popularity. In fact, the ratings are through the roof. 

Then comes Gordon Ramsey and Masterchef USA and our belief in the vicious drama of reality tv is restored. Here everything is dramatic and fast. The judges look like they have an agenda against humanity. The participants lives are highlighted to create a false sense of attachment between audience and them, something which American Idol has mastered season after season. Its tailor made for typical americans who wants drama, and have such attention deficit disorder that they can never wait for good things to unfold in its own pace (ref: Any summer blockbuster in Hollywood).  Their is enough backbiting to keep people engrossed. This is definitely reality tv program for the people for whom there has to be a break in every game after every 12-15 minutes (Ref: Baseball, Basketball, American Football) so that they receive instant gratification. They want it fast. They want it right now. And if they cant afford to wait, they will just take credit/loan to own it. 

So next time you watch a reality tv program or a soap opera; think about what it tells you about the consumer behavior of that country.

But this is a win win situation for the short term. Because eventually general mass would understand that this new love for community is just lip service. Organizations main objective was always to maximize shareholder value, not wasting money by creating parks.

But that is so 20th century! In 21st century brands should make it a point to actively try to do better things for community without having a hidden agenda, because that is the only way they will win back general public and remove the “big, bad corporation” image. What companies should never do is hide behind half-truths like CSR. The underlying fault of CSR as a tool was very clear in the strange and curious case of Enron, the Texan energy company that not only brought itself down but also one of the largest accounting firms at that time, Arthur Andersen. Enron was the blue-eyed boy of corporate philanthropy and gave away millions in charity donations to charity organizations and won several awards for its corporate social responsibility work, including a climate protection award from the EPA and a corporate conscience award from the Council on Economic Priorities. In 2001, the world of Enron came crashing down under massive debts after it was revealed that CEO Jeffrey Skilling, who was jailed for 24 years, had orchestrated a giant fraud and a massive corporate ethics scandal. Corporate social responsibility activists and media pounced on Enron and held Enron as sort of poster boy for corporate fraud. How quickly things changed! As Joel Bakan wrote in The Corporation, “Enron’s story suggests, at a minimum, that skepticism about corporate social responsibility is well warranted.” After that fall from grace, Enron never really recovered from the bad publicity as its supposed socially responsible activities became irrelevant since its very existence proved to be a fraud.

Its not a question of ethics, because its well within the ethical standards. Its about making smart strategies. Most brands can never live up to such lofty standards that they claim. All the make up in the world probably won’t make most of us look like some of the models that showcase them in pictures. If that’s the case, shouldn’t there be a back lash from consumers at certain point of time? Isnt it obvious that consumers will stop believing in advertising?

If branding is indeed a long term game, what’s the point in making consumers feel they got the short end of the deal to gain ahead in short term? There is space for blunt honesty in branding. And Unilever through its massively successful “Campaign for Real Beauty” under its Dove brand has shown just that.