thirtymlmusings

Of Marketing, brands etc.

Before Mozart’s 25th Symphony

Published by

Kaushik Prasad V

on

December 1, 2022

First published in BW Businessworld here. Who wrote the background score for Titan watches advertisements? This was a popular question in the business quiz circuit during my college days. Vinay Kamath’s book; Titan: inside India’s most successful consumer brand, chronicles the creation of Titan’s ads. Suresh Mullick of OBM (O&M’s…
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Of Marketing, brands etc.

It’s No Monkey Business

Published by

Kaushik Prasad V

on

November 23, 2022

First published in BW Businessworld. In the late 19th century a railway signalman called James Edwin ‘Jumper’ Wide worked for the South Africa railways as a guard in a town called Uitenhage. Wide had lost his legs in an accident and hence got around on peg-legs and a trolley. Around…
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Of Marketing, brands etc.

A tale of two arm wrestling matches

Published by

Kaushik Prasad V

on

November 14, 2022

In 2003, two telecommunications companies in New Zealand couldn’t decide which of them should have access to a sought-after mobile radio network. Industry regulators got involved and both companies appeared to be heading for an expensive court battle. But then, one of the companies came up with the idea of…
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Of Marketing, brands etc.

Measuring what matters.

Published by

Kaushik Prasad V

on

September 30, 2022

The paradox today is that with an unprecedented amount of data, tools, and analytics at our disposal, we are overwhelmed with reports and find it difficult to make meaning of it all
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Of Marketing, brands etc.

Marketing’s Code Talkers

Published by

Kaushik Prasad V

on

July 14, 2022

First published in BW Businessworld here. During World War I when the Germans managed to tap phonelines, intercept messages and break their codes the Allied forces were a worried lot. One day, an American Captain, walking past a trench, overheard two native American soldiers talking in an unfamiliar language. He…
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Of Marketing, brands etc.

What Snoopy Can Teach Us About Change Initiatives

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Kaushik Prasad V

on

January 3, 2022

First published in BW Businessworld here. In 1967, during a launch rehearsal test, all three astronauts of Apollo-I tragically lost their lives in a command module fire. A vast majority of NASA’s 268,000 employees were working on getting a handful of astronauts to space and NASA had to get their…
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Of Marketing, brands etc.

Do You Have A Pyke In Your Team?

Published by

Kaushik Prasad V

on

December 22, 2021

First published in BW Businessworld here. Geoffrey Nathaniel Pyke was described as, “not a scientist, but a man of a vivid and uncontrollable imagination”. He was a one-man think tank working in Lord Mountbatten’s Combined Operations during World War II. In 1940 he came up with the idea for a…
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Books

2021; The Second Innings Reading List

Published by

Kaushik Prasad V

on

December 17, 2021

Almost the end of the year. Read some great books and some not so great. See this post for my reading list from the first six months of 2021. . The year’s second innings, in books. From the must reads, to the hmmm and to ho-hmmm. The absolute stunners and…
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Of Marketing, brands etc.

When process didn’t get us to the moon.

Published by

Kaushik Prasad V

on

September 8, 2021

First published in BW Businessworld here. Soon after President Kennedy famously committed to landing a person on the moon, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) started working on the Surveyor; an unmanned machine that would soft-land on the moon, take measurements, photographs and subsequently deploy a small roving vehicle. But soon,…
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Of Marketing, brands etc.

Do you have an Acoustic Kitty project?

Published by

Kaushik Prasad V

on

August 5, 2021

First published in BW Businessworld, 19 July 2021. Read it here. In the 1960s, CIA’s Directorate of Science & Technology launched a project called Acoustic Kitty to spy on Soviet embassies. The idea was to create a feline-machine hybrid, a kind of cyborg cat. In an hour-long procedure, a veterinarian…
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