In the era of bite sized entertainment, 'byte sized' if you bring in the digital angle to it, shortness and sports are related at some level.
"Jesus wept" is the shortest verse in The Bible. The phrase, however, found its way into popular jargon when short skirts found their place in international tennis. The phrase now represents the phenomenon personified by Navratilova and her predecessors, Kournikova, Sherapova and their successors.
At another level of shortness, take cricket for example: from a 5-day-long affair to a day long version to the now as-long-as-a-movie format with T20, innovation in cricket has found for it new fans. Cricket has probably also recovered lost fans.
The information convergence led to competition, for the attention of the consumer, between traditional broadcasting media and the mobile & the Internet as media. And the consumer is increasingly drawn toward personalised entertainment. Anyone who has enjoyed the award winning video feeds on youtube (dispite all the garbage that people upload) and other video feeds can tell you why the Internet offers better quality (measured as better value per unit time?) over TV in general. Don't like NGC or Discovery channel in Hindi? Personalise it into English (or vice versa) with digital DTH. DTH is driven by technology, but consumerism (of it) is mixedly driven by need and affordability.
To apply this logic to sports, I think the race for quality content measured per unit time is another reason why shorter formats of games like cricket will revolutionize the way we consume sports-as-entertainment. You personalise the consumption of sports by chosing the format you like best.
A couple of days back, two new IPL team franchises were sold for almost 150% of the price paid for all eight original franchise teams three years back. It's like saying 'two for the price of ten'. Franchise owners know that the IPL wave has only touched the shores of Tier II cities. There is a lot of cricket ground waiting to be covered.
Talking of shortness, the quintessential cricket bat has become shorter!!! "Mongoose" is deemed to become the latest innovation in cricket. Named eponymously for the animal's ferocity, the new bat is 44% shorter on the body, compensated in weight by thickness and in length by a longer handle. Like one cricket commentator was saying, the bat in Mathew Hayden's hands looks more like a club than a bat. And clobbering Hayden did demonstrate a couple of matches ago. Mongoose helped run the meter fast!
If the the five day version of the game is the snake and the T20 version the Mongoose, who will win this match? The match, you can bet, will be much longer than an evening with IPL.
2010-03-23
2010-03-17
On public etiquette and sycophancy
Breakneck traffic on hardly busy suburban roads, Honda Civics brushing past caravans of pedal-rickshaws, traffic quasi-police trying in vain to control the flow of automobiles and an off-duty policeman without a helmet trying to cross the road even while the mainstream traffic cruised along... these are what I observed in the first ten minutes in the land of chikan and 'pehle aap - tehzeeb' (etiquette of 'you first').
But the most striking thing was that the city was aglow with blue colored lighting, blue colored cloth hoardings, large posters bearing photographs and symbols of the governing party politicians. Whizzing past statue after statue of the chief minister and mentors of the political party, I could not but wonder how much money was being spent on this mega-celebration. Then we drove past the planned venue for the gala anniversary event where more than a hundred thousand people were expected to assemble in a couple of days. But it appeared as if all the police jeeps in the city had already found parking around the locale.
My driver explained in a careful tone how the administration is spending 'araboan rupayeh' (unimaginably high amount of money) for an anniversary. While farmers and students outside the city make do with just a few hours of power everyday, the city casts a blue stamp in the sky for the passing satellite.
There was one conspicuous stretch of road though that bore absolutely no lighting. Nothing else changed- smooth as glass tarmac, neatly painted traffic-lanes, manicured divider and dedicated, separated pedestrian and bicycle tracks. The stretch was dark with no street lights of any type. The ensuing explanation of the anomaly told me about how politicians' egos function in complete isolation from public safety norms. The particular stretch of road was apparently the dream project the former chief minister. The project having been a success and the current administration being at constant loggerheads with the former, the latter chose to downplay the success of the road by knocking out all lights. Who would dare cross the road here?
Three days hence, we now know that fifty million dollars were spent and a garland made of currency notes worth a million dollars was presented to the chief of the party. Where the money came from is altogether a different question and for the CAG of India to worry. In a state where the number of people living below poverty line is one of the highest in the country, this amount of money given to them, in kind -food and shelter even- would have had a colossal impact on thousands of lives. If caste politics is the name of the game, fine, the party could have still distributed the money to their own voters if no one else. Even that, biased it may have been, would have still served a social cause.
Do the people from the, historically, economically disadvantaged factions, whose cause the party claims to champion and who voted this party to power, wonder why their chosen one did not make better use of the money? Or did they admire the pink garland of grands, thinking all the while that it looked so big and so pretty it befitted a white elephant?
A million dollar currency garland and a fifty million dollar gala is bad public tehzeeb for any leader in any land.
But the most striking thing was that the city was aglow with blue colored lighting, blue colored cloth hoardings, large posters bearing photographs and symbols of the governing party politicians. Whizzing past statue after statue of the chief minister and mentors of the political party, I could not but wonder how much money was being spent on this mega-celebration. Then we drove past the planned venue for the gala anniversary event where more than a hundred thousand people were expected to assemble in a couple of days. But it appeared as if all the police jeeps in the city had already found parking around the locale.
My driver explained in a careful tone how the administration is spending 'araboan rupayeh' (unimaginably high amount of money) for an anniversary. While farmers and students outside the city make do with just a few hours of power everyday, the city casts a blue stamp in the sky for the passing satellite.
There was one conspicuous stretch of road though that bore absolutely no lighting. Nothing else changed- smooth as glass tarmac, neatly painted traffic-lanes, manicured divider and dedicated, separated pedestrian and bicycle tracks. The stretch was dark with no street lights of any type. The ensuing explanation of the anomaly told me about how politicians' egos function in complete isolation from public safety norms. The particular stretch of road was apparently the dream project the former chief minister. The project having been a success and the current administration being at constant loggerheads with the former, the latter chose to downplay the success of the road by knocking out all lights. Who would dare cross the road here?
Three days hence, we now know that fifty million dollars were spent and a garland made of currency notes worth a million dollars was presented to the chief of the party. Where the money came from is altogether a different question and for the CAG of India to worry. In a state where the number of people living below poverty line is one of the highest in the country, this amount of money given to them, in kind -food and shelter even- would have had a colossal impact on thousands of lives. If caste politics is the name of the game, fine, the party could have still distributed the money to their own voters if no one else. Even that, biased it may have been, would have still served a social cause.
Do the people from the, historically, economically disadvantaged factions, whose cause the party claims to champion and who voted this party to power, wonder why their chosen one did not make better use of the money? Or did they admire the pink garland of grands, thinking all the while that it looked so big and so pretty it befitted a white elephant?
A million dollar currency garland and a fifty million dollar gala is bad public tehzeeb for any leader in any land.
2010-03-07
Recalling brand stories
Brands are like friends, good friends are honest and don't let friends down. This is, in brief, one of the points that Professor Abraham Koshy (
Read Profile ) made in his recent article on ET(Read Here).
Maruti-Suzuki A-Star's is an apt caselet for brand crisis prevention. Maruti-Suzuki's major, even if not the first, recall highlights the sea change in how Indian producers treat their consumers.
But when did Indian brands, let's say specifically, Indian automobile brands become good friends of the consumer?
One of the key effects of our open market economy in automobile industry is that Indian players are no more taking consumers for granted. Faced with powerful peers who are quality conscious, responsible and honest, Indian producers have learned that for them "it 's the right way, or the highway". It was also probably the oft blamed Indian 'chalta hai' attitude coupled with the existence of seller's market for a long time, that had led to manufacturers' propensity to ignore issues that bothered consumers.
In 1999, I purchased Enfield's first aluminium-engine bike called Machismo A350. The bike suffered from noisy valves that chattered wildly. But Enfield did nothing despite complaints and the bike failed miserably. New avatars of the bike emerged a couple of years later, but many were left holding lemons.
Then, take for example, Bajaj Chetak's famous 'tilting of the scooter' trick. Unless the scooter was tilted at a difficult angle, known only to an owner, the fuel wouldn't start flowing. I remember seeing this growing up in the '80s, when scooters ruled, as well as in the mid 2000s, when aerodynamic bikes whizzed past the humble scooter. Everyone knew it was a fuel problem (you did not see it in other scooters, by the way). But Bajaj did nothing, apparently, to fix the problem for 20 odd years. I guess after some time the tilting became an ownership statement, a romantic one at that. And Bajaj could probably get away because of the strong heritage value. A Bajaj scooter offered mass consumer value on which India rode for a few generations.
But at some point in time between the 90s and early 2000s two things overtook the Bajaj scooter phenomenon. First, were the Bajaj bikes, which themselves were a response to the flood of 100 cc bikes that, to name the pioneers, Hero Honda and TVS Suzukis had caused. The second was the shifting consumer preference. Who cared for a technologically stagnant product when there were so many options available? Pick up any auto magazine and see how many pages the bikes table, already written in small sized font, runs into. So, is this one of the reasons why the Bajaj scooter was put to rest?
Today, however, it is the buyer's market. Consumerism, aided by information-empowerment in the background of open competition has helped clean up the manufacturer's act and enabled consumer to 'unfriend' the brands she cannot trust.
Read Profile ) made in his recent article on ET(Read Here).
Maruti-Suzuki A-Star's is an apt caselet for brand crisis prevention. Maruti-Suzuki's major, even if not the first, recall highlights the sea change in how Indian producers treat their consumers.
But when did Indian brands, let's say specifically, Indian automobile brands become good friends of the consumer?
One of the key effects of our open market economy in automobile industry is that Indian players are no more taking consumers for granted. Faced with powerful peers who are quality conscious, responsible and honest, Indian producers have learned that for them "it 's the right way, or the highway". It was also probably the oft blamed Indian 'chalta hai' attitude coupled with the existence of seller's market for a long time, that had led to manufacturers' propensity to ignore issues that bothered consumers.
In 1999, I purchased Enfield's first aluminium-engine bike called Machismo A350. The bike suffered from noisy valves that chattered wildly. But Enfield did nothing despite complaints and the bike failed miserably. New avatars of the bike emerged a couple of years later, but many were left holding lemons.
Then, take for example, Bajaj Chetak's famous 'tilting of the scooter' trick. Unless the scooter was tilted at a difficult angle, known only to an owner, the fuel wouldn't start flowing. I remember seeing this growing up in the '80s, when scooters ruled, as well as in the mid 2000s, when aerodynamic bikes whizzed past the humble scooter. Everyone knew it was a fuel problem (you did not see it in other scooters, by the way). But Bajaj did nothing, apparently, to fix the problem for 20 odd years. I guess after some time the tilting became an ownership statement, a romantic one at that. And Bajaj could probably get away because of the strong heritage value. A Bajaj scooter offered mass consumer value on which India rode for a few generations.
But at some point in time between the 90s and early 2000s two things overtook the Bajaj scooter phenomenon. First, were the Bajaj bikes, which themselves were a response to the flood of 100 cc bikes that, to name the pioneers, Hero Honda and TVS Suzukis had caused. The second was the shifting consumer preference. Who cared for a technologically stagnant product when there were so many options available? Pick up any auto magazine and see how many pages the bikes table, already written in small sized font, runs into. So, is this one of the reasons why the Bajaj scooter was put to rest?
Today, however, it is the buyer's market. Consumerism, aided by information-empowerment in the background of open competition has helped clean up the manufacturer's act and enabled consumer to 'unfriend' the brands she cannot trust.
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