From the category archives:

Market Insights

Reading Bytes for May 4 – Education, Social Publishing, Mobiles and Marketing

May 4, 2010

Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

A Social Publishing Strategy by @gkjohn at @kanter covers education/publishing. love the skype reading sessions esp. -

“Our strategy has relied upon being part of a larger mission, providing meaningful and valuable content, curating information and [...]

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Durability – is it losing power as a customer driver – Part 3

April 11, 2010

Fantastic post from Manu Prasad that broadens the discussion on Durability and takes it forward in new directions.
Brand equity is something that falls naturally into the scope of this discussion. But what i was more interested in its impact on the content that brands create, including their communication. Look at say, print ads, whose [...]

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Durability – is it losing power as a customer driver [part 2]

March 31, 2010

Some of my blog readers have left really thoughtful comments at my last post on Durability. I’m attempting to synthesize them here, (and I hope I’m not killing the wonderful nuances they’ve shared), as each thought adds a unique and new facet to the many dimensions and interpretations of durability, in a rapidly-changing market like India.
Vinuth’s [...]

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Durability – is it losing power as a customer driver?

March 29, 2010

A while ago, a Client who is working on a project where she wanted evidence that durability is losing its power as a consumer driver in some product categories in India. Durability was always  It’s a tricky question really, as there are multiple India’s and each of them displays different drivers when purchasing and adopting [...]

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Twitter & Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs … nay … Hierarchy of #Tweets

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs January 12, 2010

I was chatting with a friend today who’s not a Twitter user, and trying to explain why I like it, and why so many people do too. I found myself turning to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and his Theory of Human Motivations to try and explain this. I discovered this blog post titled The [...]

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My laptop, my MBA! Commercial Mobile Innovation for SME’s

August 31, 2009

This is the last post in the series on Mobile Innovations based on a learning journey that I was a part of. Here’s the full series:

Mobile Innovations – Introduction
Nokia Life Tools – Agriculture Service – “The Internet for the next million” – mobile innovations in rural India
Nokia Life Tools – Education Service – “Raju [...]

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India Social Media Survey – Brands & Corporates

December 22, 2008

Take this – it’s a great start to collecting some good data:

We need your participation:

You can take the survey here- open until 24 December 2008 but don’t wait until the last day.

All valid participants get a FREE copy of Summary & Key Points from the “Overview of Blog & Social Media Environment in India”, a [...]

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Mobile Phones, Emerging Markets and Stuart Henshall

May 13, 2008

Stuart’s becoming quite the expert on mobility in urban India!! He was here end-April for a little over a week and we did a lot of learning around the mobile phone space in Mumbai. Next time, small towns too!! Its really cool to see how he can really get to some deep [...]

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Twitter research .. in action!

February 5, 2008

Rob Paterson alerts me to Jeremiah Owyang’s social media experiment in a comment at my post a few days ago on Twitter for Ethnography:

From Rob’s post at the Fast Forward blog:
This is how Jeremiah framed it:
I’ve created MicroMedia events before, this time, I want to frame it as an overlay to the multi million dollar [...]

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We participate therefore we are …

February 1, 2008

vs

Great piece on Social Learning titled Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler. The supercool text illustrations are by Susan E. Haviland.
Some snippets I really enjoyed:
What do we mean by “social learning”? Perhaps the simplest way to explain this concept is to note [...]

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Twitter for Ethnography

February 1, 2008

There’s a discussion on at the anthrodesign group around how best to approach a diary project. An excerpt from the initial query:
“We’ll be fielding a diary study trying to understand people’s initial experiences with a new mobile phone, particularly understanding the set up experience and the first few days of use. We are interested [...]

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My week on a Learning Journey

January 14, 2008

I am just back from a week-long Learning Journey my colleague Shubhangi and I organised for a group of 10 very senior health-care professionals from the US who are on a Futures Task Force … it was intensive, immersive and really very rewarding. It’s been a Learning Journey for all of us – we formed [...]

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Talk to me, Helena Rubinstein!

October 25, 2007

When a woman thinks about her body and beauty she is sensitive, and when a product is new or gifted to her, it is often embarrassing to say, I don’t really know how to use it. By not talking to her or enabling a conversation with her, you actually make her wonder whether you [...]

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Word of Mouth – more powerful in Asian countries

October 23, 2007

There’s been some recent discussion around whether Word of Mouth and Viral Marketing are indeed different. In my view, viral marketing is the outcome of word-of-mouth recommendations. And it’s not surprising to see Asians rely a lot on word of mouth in this study from Neilsen that reveals some interesting trends:
- 7 of [...]

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