Fear of rejection

Fear of rejection is an awesome tool for marketers,atleast for the marketers of beauty products,it can do wonders for the sales if one can use the emotion correctly,the idea is simple "you dont look good, you are no good",marketers try to induce this fear into a prospect, if not already present by making the prospect realise how she/he has been a looser for not being attractive and hey marketer always gotta solution,use his product,some Imakeyouattractive cream (or whatever) and you're gonna look like Christina augilera or some other diva.


I was reading this post on ad campaign of Fair and Handsome of Emami ,Fair and Handsome made a lousy TVC and failed to use the emotion correctly,the interesting thing here is despite having a losy ad campaign,the product is worth Rs 45 crore now,this shows how powerful the "Fear of rejection" is,If you are not an Indian (South Asian) lemme tell you that people in here associate fair skin with beauty.See the chart Emami made explaining why you are a looser if you are not Fair.


P.S: Being fair here implies having a fair skin

Customer Support - II

Previously I've written about the bad customer support I got from Imate and my previous Host,this post is a sequel,only that this one is not about the grievance, I had problem configuring my domain for blogger for a long time,I didn't get any support with my previous host and I moved to a new one,IndiaInternets and they solved the problem in a couple of hours,though it was only changing the settings,I appreciate them calling me to learn the problem and solving it

Now I publish on my own domain www.pradeepkumar.com and the previous address http://pradsworld.blogspot.com get's redirected to the new domain name.

Sprint Nextel fired customers??

We've always learned that we should strive to retain our customers no matter what, and it sounds so stupid that Sprint Nextel actually fired their customers,why would anybody fire their customers at all,well here Sprint might have done a good thing,Sprint had few customers calling up very frequently with queries on billing and service,they were draining out the support resources,and Nextel fired them,I agree with mike as to why firing some of these customers is a good idea.

Mike's three reasons why one should fire some of these customers

1. All your other good customers will love you more
2. Business is a FOR-profit endeavor for a reason
3. Pushing back brings respect and value

See the Firing letter sentout by sprint

The Call Of The Entrepreneur

Awesome video I found through blogtrepreneur.

Why do people buy?

This kind of makes a really good question for every marketer and business man,I was reading this book "How to sell yourself" by Joe Girard, he confronts us to this question,Why do people buy, do they buy to possess a thing or something else,actually no body buys a thing to possess it per se,rather people buy things coz they are influenced by their emotions to buy,people buy coz they "need" comfort or social status or to solve their problems.

Now this makes another good question,how to make people buy?

Personal Branding

Now-a-days personal branding has become so important(actually I've got to learn only recently),your email ID (mine pradeep@pradeepkumar.com) and domain name on ya name and the google search result of your name, these all have become so important for ya business and networking,I realised lately that having www.pradeepkumar.com redirected to blogspot( you can see, it shows pradsworld.blogspot.com) is a really bad thing,acually I'm not adding much to my domain name but I'm adding credibility to google,which it doesn't need.

I got my domain name registered through one of those cheap domain names webhost and I'm suffering for it, they literally offer no support.

I've been trying to make the CNAME of my domain point to ghs.google.com , as described in the blogger support pages and the reply I got from the web host was " You don't own google" !!!

Now I'm moving to another DNS host so that I can have my domain name shown for my blog, one step forward for my personal branding

Customer support

Everybody knows that really good customer support is vital for the success of a business.Products,usually software have loads of bugs,customer could still bear with the bugs if fix is provided on a need basis,i.e., if the company provides good support for the product,the worst of the things one could do,is providing no support.

I have a problem with my I-mate JAMA I bought few days ago,when I turn on the speaker for the phone,the person on the other end hear's an awful echo of his own,I wanted to enquire about this with the Live-tech support on their website and was astonished to find the tech-support is offline at 1:01 PM!! I wonder If there is any support at all.

Why I think Monster's Video Resume` will not work

Monster India has launched Video Resume` service and it supports every format of video that youtube does,all you need to do is shoot a pitch of yours on a digital camera and upload it to monster and Voila, wov that's great ,but what I wonder is what kinda value addition does the monster offer to their customers through this? very little or none, I guess, coz there'll not many people actually using this service,coz people have stage fear, they have fear for camera,people run away from fear,so how are they gonna manage to do this and also If they are targetting media industry for this,still I'm not sure if it'll work.

Before thinking of a product or service,one should actually figure out the amount of value addition you're gonna offer a customer and this is where value innovation comes into picture.

Why clothes matter?

Clothes, do matter, the way you dress kindof convey's what you are and not just this, when I read this post on trizle,I thought " Oh, yes, this is true,I've noticed the same damn thing,Dressing good actually improves your performance and boosts ya confidence",

According to Harvard Medical’s Alice Domar

Although it may seem counterintuitive to slip into the skirt you save for special occasions, it helps to look in the mirror and see an energizing image — not a deflating one that confirms and reinforces your internal state.

Dressing for success will give you a big mental boost every time you catch sight of your reflection throughout the day.

Trizle's El rule of Thumb says

*If you dress sloppy, you’ll likely do sloppy work.
*If you dress kick-ass, you’ll likely do kick-ass work.