Samsung Galaxy III - Brand that is Going to Rock at London Olymics 2012

What an exciting branding opportunity for Samsung – Its newly launched Samsung Galaxy SIII has been announced as Olympic Games 2012 Phone.

The company is one of the world’s major manufacturers of cell phones. Timing for the launch of its latest Galaxy SIII were perfect and its partnership with VISA to provide mobile payment solutions to VISA customers using Samsung products will give an excellent boost to its brand equity. Smart enough, company’s strategic alliance with VISA, the most wanted plastic money in the world which is establishing around 3000 contactless payment kiosks in and around London where millions of sports lovers will be provided a unique experience of convenience and secure payments in restaurants and malls is going to help Samsung a lot!

During Beijing Olympics in 2008, Samsung experienced a 100% growth in its market share in the more challenging Chinese market. Company hopes to experience the same in the European market in 2012.

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Simple and Effective Blogging Techniques

Blogging undoubtedly is an art. It requires sense of humor, creativity, language skills and also bit of technical skills. I have been blogging for over six years now. I learnt the technical bits by the process of hit and trail. My mission is to transfer knowledge about blogging to anyone who is interested in learning the skill!

Blogger.com is a Google product which is already optimized to appear in Google Search if proper labeling; key word density and title text is used.

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Linchpin Lessons by Seth Godin

Seth Godin has written 15 books and is considered as the Marketing Guru of this era. He has revolutionized the concept of marketing and personal development. In this book, using his unique style, he stresses on the need to enhance your abilities to become indispensable.

The importance of understanding the need to become indispensable is also very rightly highlighted by the author. He suggests that only indispensable people become integral part of an organization and are rarely replaced or challenged.

Seth’s views on how a Linchpin operates are point to pounder. Their ability to create their own roadmap and engaging others in implementing the creative strategies need a careful review by readers. Key message from Seth is “Linchpins do not require a map, they create one”.

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Louise Hazel, Brand Ambassador for Panasonic at London Olympics

Following is a message from Eleanor Kawamura of Panasonic – The Company is one of the key sponsors of London Olympics 2012.

“Here’s a picture-perfect picture of a postcard from London! ♥
I’d like to announce that we’ll be going into a week-long break until Monday next week (May 7th). It’s called “Golden Week” in Japan with many public holidays in a row, such as Shōwa Day, Constitution Memorial Day, Greenery Day and Children’s Day.

My favorite is Children’s day because we hang up some fish decorations that flutter in the wind. It’s a lot of fun!

We will reply to any questions when we come back. Have a great week everybody! Show a Day, Constitutional Memorial Day, Children Day.

My favorite is Children day because we hang some fish decorations that flutter in the wind and has lots of fun. We will reply to any questions when we come back. Have a great week everybody.”
Panasonic has engaged its followers on company’s Facebook fan page . The company has adapted an interesting strategy; they are uploading attractive pictures from around London and also making very soft comments about these pictures.

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Coca Cola is Using London Olympics 2012 for Promoting its Brand

Coca Cola is one of the key sponsors of London Olympics 2012. Tough for Pepsi, they will gain massive mileage during the 17 days event. As a branding strategy, Coke has always associated its brand with the feeling of togetherness and joy. How could they let go this opportunity that comes after five years! After all Olympics is one of the biggest sports events in the world.

Coca Cola as its branding strategy for London Olympics 2012 have created a commercial “Move to the Beat”. This commercial was unveiled by on 15 February 2012 (check the video at the bottom of this post). Some of you may remember that in 2010 FIFA World CUP, Coke produced a new version of a Somali- Canadian K’Nana’s Waving Flag Song. Its association with an event that was watched by scores of people, the song became extremely viral on social media networks, giving massive brand equity to the company.

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McDonald’s Branding Strategy at Olympics 2012

As one of the chief official sponsors of London 2012 Olympics, McDonald’s restaurant is using its marketing and innovation strategy to attract large numbers at the world’s biggest McDonald’s with seating capacity for 1500 people. This restaurant is being built specially to serve large crowd at the games.

It is estimated that over 3 million customers will walk into this gigantic facility which will be operated by over 2000 staff and is equipped to serve over 50,000 Big Macs during the games. This unique facility is build using recyclable materials and is spread over 9,000 square feet.

McDonald’s has been sponsoring Olympic games since 1976 and fully understands the opportunity for creating more loyal customers during Olympics. The London Olympics 2012 will be the 9^th games for McDonald’s to act as the event’s official restaurant and the only branded food retailer burgers and French fries to feed hungry customers.

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Twitter Followers Will Enjoy Olympics in a Unique Way

London Olympics will be tweeted massively. This is the first event of this magnitude for Twitter and users all over the world will follow and engage with tweets about sports they love. To faclitate social media users, in London, a hudge Wi-Fi network has been created which will be 100% free!

British Telecom operator O2 is providing this excellent facility to ensure that millions of visitors that come to the City have the best experience possible and share their experiences on social media networks.

I a press release, Derek McManus, Chief Operating Officer for O2 said, “This groundbreaking deal – the first of its kind in the UK – will see us deliver high quality connectivity across London in time for London 2012. Our longer-term aim is to expand our footprint of O2 Wifi, which is open to everyone, and also intelligently enhance our services at street level, where people need the network the most.
“Our £500m annual network investment program is focused on integrating new layers of technology into the existing network to enable a seamless and sustained customer experience. We are driven entirely by our customers’ needs and believe that services should be delivered in the best possible way, across multiple networks and supported by different technologies.”

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Olympics 2012 - An Opportunity for Global Brands

This year’s largest sports extravaganza will be London Olympics 2012, the best opportunity for brands to increase their brand equity and to win hearts of their customers. London Olympics are starting from 27 July and will finish on 12^th August.

According to Daily Telegraph, BBC Television is gearing up to broadcast London Olympics to about 42,000,000 people. There will be 24 BBC internet channels providing HD streaming throughout the games. 20,000 media centers will work around the clock to host a similar number of journalists. There will be 1,233 cameras to do coverage of the event. And this is just one channel with many others in the que!

One of the biggest gainer from Olympics 2012 will be the hotel and travel industry in and around London. They are expected to accommodate close to a million visitors during the 17 days of games. Londoners will experience traffic chaos, chocked restaurants and pubs, markets will overflow. But all that is great for the official sponsors!

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Knowledge Workforce & Web 2.0

Digital era is the era of knowledge workforce. This means that in addition to specializations, the workforce at all levels require multiple skills in social sciences and technology. Accept it or not, technology has been integrated into our daily routine that has altered our DNAs. Smartphones, Blackberries, iPads and Tabs have given us the opportunity to learn faster and engage community around us effectively.

In early 1990, I started my job as a Trade Promotion Assistant at the British Consulate in Karachi. Coming from a commercial organization, I was shocked to learn that the office did not have a fax machine! Couple of months after my joining, as part of process improvement exercise, staff was asked to submit suggestions. Guess what, I recommended a fax machine.
Whereas Management Officer considered that as the best recommendation and allocated a budget for purchase of a fax machine of my choice, my head of department was unsure why we need this equipment.

After two decades, I now understand that perhaps until 90’s, technology penetration in the corporate world was slow, hence the acceptability of new technology. Situation is now different and corporate leaders who fail to adapt new technologies are fast pushing their companies into Coma!
I found an interesting video by Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business in which he explained how Web Enterprise 2.0 and other new collaborative tools let everyone create and organize information.
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An Excellent Story of Entrepreneurial Success

Social Media networking sites such as Facebook, Orket, Twitter, Linkedin and many more are building communities and helping people to exchange knowledge and information. These social media networks are also helping in promotion of brands, marketing, fund raising and conducting surveys.

I recently met team of Pakistani social media network “Pring”and inspired by their creativity and decided to publish the following interview I had with the creator of Pring Muhammad Nasarullah.

“We make Pakistan’s largest social network called Pring. We’re connecting Pakistanis on any handset with information and people they care about.”

An excellent story of entrepreneurial success! Click here to read

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Key Tools for Success

Last week a young man how follows me on twitter sent me a request for meeting. I invited him over for a glass of Lassi. His name is Muhammad Saad Khan. He has an interesting twitter profile that says “Writer, Social Media & Search Engine Marketing Philanthropist & Thought Leader, Public speaker/Social Activist to Fight Human Trafficking”.

I found our conversation highly inspiring with lots of excellent learning tips. Sharing with my readers a brief synopsis of what we discussed.

Build your vocabulary of Positive words: I 100% agree with this. Humans are attuned to remember negative happenings around them. You will not find anyone who had never experienced good things in his life. But in most cases, if you ask people to write their negative and positive vocabulary, they will write several negative words and only few positive words. We are attuned to negativity and the only way to undo this is by improving our vocabulary of positive words.

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How to become Indispensable

Are you a Linchpin?

A person who is as indispensable as a linchpin in a hand grenade – He is missed if he is gone!
This terminology is invented by Seth Godin, an author with 13 bestselling books on his credit, an entrepreneur who has created successful businesses, a speaker who motivates audience with his mesmerizing style and examples, a visionary marketer. Seth is called “America’s Greatest Marketer”. He writes a blog which is ranked by Technorati as the #1 blog in the world written by a single individual.

Seth Godin’s focus is on the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, how to deal with the changing dynamics of this ever changing world.
I was recently reading a blog 5 Ways to Become Indispensable at Work and this post is a comparison of two distinct views on “How to become indispensable”.

You can become indispensable - Click here to read how

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12 Leadership Lessons by Steve Jobs

What were the 12 Visionary Leadership Lesson Guy Kawasaki learnt from Steve Jobs?
Do you know who Guy Kawasaki is? He worked for Apple as software evangelist and later on as Chief software evangelist. His job was to convince people to write software for Apple.

He worked for Steve Jobs twice, only few are on this league! Guy is highly inspired by Steve Jobs’s vision and leadership qualities. He described the following key lessons that inspired his life:

1. Experts are clueless: Youngsters have temptations to default to older people but innovation is usually done by younger generation. Experts are generally stuck in older thinking pattern.
2. Customers can not tell you what they need: They can define things that are within their vocabulary. If you want to win the world, ignore your customers. Use your own vision to create stuff that creates markets never before.

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Changing Trend in Marketing with Social Media

A report published at Bloomberg suggests that; “Market for social media management tools grow over 100% to $970 million in 2016, from $389 million this year.”

The trend for marketing is changing through the globe. There are studies that show that fewer people are reading newspaper ads or billboards. According to Mashable “more people get their news from the Internet than from newspapers — and more ad dollars went to online outlets than to newspapers, too.”

This is supported by a surveys conducted by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism that says, “34% of respondents said they read news online within the past 24 hours (as opposed to 31% who favored newspapers); and a full 41% said they get most of their news online, 10% more than those who said they got most of their news from a newspaper.”

Most voters in this survey were from age group 18-to-29, and that is the market today and in the future!

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Emotions | Power to Succcess

My last blog on this subject titled “What is Success? Concept Re-defined!” talked about how people perceive success.

I continued reading stuff on this topic and found that Anthony Robbins in his book “Awaken the Giant
Within” provided an excellent set of 10 Emotions that could lead to a successful life.

These Emotions are:

Love and Warmth
In my opinion only dead are unable to express love and warmth. There is only one way to prove that you are alive and still have soul in your body – love and warmth. Anthony writes that “love can melt almost any negative emotions, hence generate warmth”.

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Deliver Effective Presentations

Giving an effective presentation is fun and enriches a sense of personal power; a quality presentation can help you win contacts, contracts and fortune! This is one of the key ingredients that will take your business to the next level.

I generally advise presenters to consider the 5P rule. This rule is explained in the last line of this post.
Presenters are generally required to learn to stand or move with a firm posture and speak with a natural accent. Understanding their audience and the environment is also advisable. Presenters who fail to exert a lot of energy and passion are unable to motivate their audience. It is also essential to learn the art of engaging your participants and stimulating the thought process for effective feedback and learning.

I have compiled a list of dos for those willing to learn the art of effective presentations!
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Techniques to Fight Depression?

One of the biggest causes of failure in achieving high growth in your career is “depression”. This blog post is written for depressed people and there are many. Some will accept it, some will not.

Let’s do a bit of self diagnostic of environment in which we wake-up every morning, drag ourselves until the day is over and ask just one question, how do I classify depression?

• A state when I feel no energy
• When I can only think of bad things
• Do not see light at the end of tunnel
• Fail to focus on issues (lack of concentration)
• Unhappy feeling
• Sleeplessness, fear and craving for food
• Unwell feeling on getting out of the bed in the morning

If you face any of the above in 24 hours, you might be experiencing depression, and it makes you powerless!
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Why Use Direct Mail as a promotional tool?

Remember those days when we used to wait for postman to deliver our mail? Things have changed; we now receive most of our bills, invoices and notices via email. Marketing and promotional material that used to flood our post box, now being sent to us in our spam box!

I recently conducted a random survey asking people about their preferences on receiving promotional material. Whereas most respondents expressed their preference to receive promotions via email, there was an alarming commonality, “It was easier to delete the email”.

Obviously when marketing and promotion is one of the major costs in any business, such a finding is scary. A major challenge for email marketing companies is to increase the “Open Rate”. There are various estimates and researches. But most experts agree that a 10-15% open rate is good. More important stuff is the action that the reader takes after reading the email. Logically speaking, a reader could delete, forward, respond or take no action.

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I was reading a report done by Constant Contact (one of the top email marketing companies in the US) based on a survey done in Fall 2011 that shows that 81% small business prefer face-to-face contact with the potential customers. Hence the importance of human contact is undeniable, particularly in case of small businesses.

Laughter Therapy Can Change Your Mental and Emotional State

We all are stuck in the whirlpool of happenings around us. Most of us remain in the “struggle mode” throughout our life! Fame, fortune, and family – we all need these three things and these either link us to happiness or depression.

Looking around, we now see people walking like emotionless zombies. Worried and depressed! People have generally stopped laughing. Unhappiness surrounds us on a daily basis. Our physiologies have now attuned to like depression. We like to listen to worrisome news. Discussions with friends and family are often circle around bad news!

Socialization is now done virtually. No more regular meetings with people you know, but interactions with people you are friends with on social media such as Facebook or Twitter. Sleepless nights texting or chatting, does that help in keeping us fresh and healthy?

No need to remember seven digit land-line phone numbers anymore. Historically, our minds were intelligent enough to remember telephone numbers such as home, office, in-laws and couple of friends. Not anymore though! I remember telephone companies replacing old printed directories every year. I am sure most of younger generation does not know what a telephone director looked like!

Grow with Assertive Behavior

A lot of people mix-up the meanings of being assertive and being aggressive. These are two distinctive behaviors. In simple words, assertiveness is related to open dialogue, exchange of views and situational analysis to come-up with a win-win conclusion, a truly positive action. Whereas being aggressive is a negative behavior.

Observe communication style of the most successful people around you and make a note of their assertiveness. In most cases you will see that assertive people do not try to impose their thoughts, but are tactfully able to make the other party agree upon certain things.

In today’s highly competitive business and work environment, if you are not assertive enough, you will not grow! Let’s analyze how assertive you are by answering the following questions on a scale of 1-10 (1 being the least times, and 10 being the most times):

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Spying Your Business Competitors

Spying on competitors can help businesses align marketing and pricing strategy.
While identifying competition, it is necessary not to keep your vision too narrow. A wider angle and more thorough approach will bring more competitors on your radar. Companies that fail to adapt this wider approach and identify their competitors narrowly are endangered by smooth operators who can easily become strong competitive threats.

This fast paced business environment requires quick and comprehensive information on competitor’s activity and the next potential move or product launch or even sponsorship to an event. In simple words, a successful business always stays at least one step ahead of its competitors.

While identifying competition, one of the key mistakes is to look only for your competitor’s positive points that might pull your customers. Not many businesses consider importance of negative aspects of your competitor’s business model – think about it, if you exactly know the negative elements of your competitor’s branding, marketing or pricing strategy, you can use this as an advantage to your company.

I read an excellent piece by David Aaker who is the vice chairman of Prophet and the author of Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant. He writes the davidaaker.com blog on branding. David suggests;
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Mistakes to Avoid in 2012

Today is the first of January 2012, a new year has begun. It will bring joy and happiness for many, some will suffer and some will struggle. That is the reality of life.

2012 will be a challenging year for small businesses across the globe. With deepening economic crisis in Europe, threat of Euro zone and Euro, possibility of Greece and Italy defaulting and push to convince Germany to take the hit by paying for financially strangled nations in Europe, things are not promising!

The US Economy continued in depression since 2007. Although, US economists and the media, including New York Times. Los-Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Herald Tribune have acknowledged US economic growth in 2011, the consumer market still looks dull!

Middle East remained a turbulent region during 2011; it is highly unlikely for this region to perform well in the New Year.

According to Moody’s, Asia Pacific economies are going to see some slowdown mainly reflecting upon the economic crisis in Europe. There are chances of recovery in the second half of 2012, but a lot depends on how well the US and European economies perform!

The situation is alarming and a number of businesses particularly domestic businesses in smaller economies will be required to play safe. To be able to survive, small businesses must focus avoiding four major mistakes during 2012:

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Brand Building with a Perfect Logo

Let me start this post by asking a simple question:

What is the first thing an entrepreneur creates before starting a business?

Answer: A business logo.

The reason is simple. Logo is created to build brand identity and it is also a visual representation of your business that helps in building brand equity and ensuring customer loyalty. Therefore it is essential to consider spending time and energy in creating a perfect logo.
Some people rightly argue that logo is not a brand, according to Dan Pallotta who is an expert in nonprofit sector innovation and a pioneering social entrepreneur;

“A brand is much more than a name or a logo. Brand is everything, and everything is brand”
This means that everything that goes around creating brand value and brand recognition is important, and my view is that an attractive logo plays a vital role in doing so.
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Micro Management Failures!

The term Micro Management means keeping close control on happenings within an organization. The term has a negative connotation and rightly so. Manager’s role is to facilitate, but a micro manager generally creates roadblocks for other coworkers.

Small business owners tend to micromanage, but once the business grows, the scope of an owner manager’s responsibilities change. It however becomes challenging for him to realize the situation, which ultimately makes life difficult for him and his coworkers. In this post, I would like to focus on why people micromanage and what can be done to improve situation in an organization.

Psychologically, we all are micromanagers; some will consider this a radical statement. But the fact of the matter is that human generally think that “they are correct and others are goofs”. Those who say that they are working for micro managers, most of the time do not realize that they micromanage too
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The Age of Social Media

My recent posts focused on business opportunities available through social media. There is no doubt that social media is an extension of online businesses, but the same also provides business promotion opportunities for non-online business too. This post is about some examples of how businesses in Pakistan are using social media to increase outreach and building brand value.

In the modern age of social media, physical presence of a business is becoming irrelevant. For example a pizza oven at home can be turned into a potential business. I have taken this example from 14^th Street Pizza, based in Karachi. Based on a simple business model, marketing is done only via Facebook. They have an active Facebook page with over 130,000 fans. This marketing tool brings them massive sales every day.

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Growing Opportunites for Making Money Online

Power of web 2.0 is still unfolding. Businesses small or large, corporations, political parties, think tanks etc are fast becoming aware of the fact “There is no escape from the might of internet!” Looking back in the history, CEO of CNET Halsey Minor was amongst the first corporate leaders who accepted the power of internet. Started as a cable TV in 1992, CNET soon started beaming via the web.

Amazon has been recognized the first comprehensive ecommerce enabled marketing platform. The growth has been phenomenal for this company, in 1999, Amazon touched the annual revenue US$1.5 billion. In the quarter ending June 2011, the revenue stood at US$ 9.91 billion.

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