A home for your hobbies

A well executed service concept can be a great inspiration and Pidilite Hobby Ideas is one such. Recently walked into one their outlets (Bangalore) and besides the amazing range of goodies that Pidilite has put together from across the world, one is struck by the overall service experience.
Hobby ideas is an upstream stationery shop which caters to a host of pastime pursuits – from the regular like painting, sketching etc. to more exotic ones like clay modelling, wood modelling etc. Besides it has accessories that enable even novices like me to produce something which is aesthetically acceptable. There are dye-cuts, punches, glitters, origami papers, and all sorts of things which can take even a simple greeting card to a new level of accomplishment.
It is all put together with enormous care and attention and the excitement one feels is similar to the one in a toyshop for a child!
Moreover, what really caught my imagination is the way they are going about marketing themselves. One can attend a free workshop every evening for 3 hours with a highly skilled Pidilite person and produce a hobby idea (which are all displayed in the store), and they also have a service where one can organize a birthday in a part of the store with a customized workshop where the stuff that the guests produce can be taken home as the return gift. In December they are launching a series of weekly workshops aimed at homemakers and children.
It is this kind of experiential marketing that creates a high degree of loyalty in customers. Pidilite have not gone for a high profile media blitz or an invitation sale, instead they have opted for a more difficult, slow burn path to create a small but dedicated base of customers who have experienced the joy of producing a hobby.
And we all know that it is not so easy for a highly product oriented company to pull something like this off in the service domain.
Have always admired this little gem of a company out of Mumbai for its innovative ways but we will leave that for another post.

Bharti’s New Identity

Because this blog’s central focus is on brand building for ‘organization brands’, every time a significant corporate brand undergoes a facelift, I am tempted to add my two bits.

The Bharti Group being the latest one to go in for a new garb.
Frankly, more often than not I have felt that the visual identity changes tend to be taken up without any real change on the ground. In fact, one gets the sense that it is often to create a sense of activity in the absence of any real change on the ground.

However, in the case of Bharti, clearly the organization had transformed way beyond what its earlier identity reminded stakeholders of. There was a clearly a case of underlining that change and getting all the diversified forays of the group underlined in public memory. Having built a hugely successful core business in telephony, the group has also attracted the likes of Wal Mart and Axa to partner with it.
The new logo makes no attempt to maintain continuity with the past, indicative if the trajectory the group’s growth has followed. It is a striking new font in a color that one doesn’t see very often and the subtle idea in the perpendicular arrow-heads is well integrated into the unit.
Having said that, one also wonders whether the group missed out on an opportunity to make the idea work a little harder.
Fundamentally, the new identity, with all its attempts at taking the high ground, fails to capture the uniqueness of the Bharti personality. Part of the reason being the lack of idiosyncrasy in the Bharti group itself. They try very hard to portray a good, responsible big boy image and model themselves on the Sri Rama Archetype much like TATA or Infosys does.
Even the advertising around the new idea is as motherhood as one can get with the core message of ‘small steps resulting in something big’ and using metaphors like Gandhi etc. is nothing but a lazy attempt at creativity, with neither much upside nor much downside (when Apple did 'the crazy ones' more than a decade ago it was an idea and they could pull it off, but subsequently many have tried to ride on it without it really sticking to them). The full page ad Bharti did about a week back, could have belonged to a dozen other success stories of the last decade.
The TV commercial looks more like an a/v one would do for an internal sales meet to kick it off on a high.

Instead a closer to reality story probably would have worked much better.
There is a certain endearing humility to Mr. Sunil Mittal, which is a quality the group may do well to capture. Also, it has more Indian-ness than an Infy or a TATA, reflected in its North Indian roots and its ‘band of brothers’ management structure. In a way this makes the group more earthy, accessible and charming. They seem to be in denial of their rough edges and in the process miss out on the spunk.
It is a Dhoni compared to the Dravid/Kumbles, that it tries to walk in the footsteps of.
This cultural uniqueness of this group, along with its stellar business success could have given the communication that edge that it currently sorely lacks.