Sell it to me

What does it really take to sell a product? Yes it depends on the type of product. There is no way you could sell a luxury brand toothpaste or a cheap 'Rs 1-lakh Bentley for the common man'. In the former, people would not want to shell out 4 years of savings to buy 200 gm of a paste that will keep their teeth clean for 2 hours. In the latter case, the cheap price would seriously undermine the prestige that comes with owning a Bentley. It wouldn't be so exotic if your gardener drives around in it would it? No offense to any gardeners who may happen to be reading this blog. You guys rock. The 0.01% of the world's population that still owns a garden in today's world of apartment blocks and housing tenements depend on you.

Now would you really buy that shaving cream just because that popular film star held it up for a few seconds on television? He gets a million dollars of shareholder's money for holding up that cream. He doesn't give a damn whether the cream helps you shave your hair or grow it. He probably cant even pronounce Gillette. Then why is it that apparently a product will sell better if a celebrity endorses it? Personally I base my choices only on what my friends tell me and on experimenting with different brands at the supermarket. I have tried all brands of toothpaste and soap before now sticking to one. Same with coffee powder. Deodorant. Mobile networks. So for me, if 10 different celebrities endorse 10 different products, 9 of them are wrong. But the system works. Go figure. I have found that the only dependable ways of determining a product's reliability are word of mouth and experimenting. I bought the mobile i own now because a friend bought it and i liked the features. I had based my previous choice on a television ad which showed the best feature of the mobile. Unfortunately it turned out the mobile does not have any other features beside that. Corporate ethics and advertising don't really go hand in hand. They cant afford to.

So how do you sell a product? For me, the only way is to make the product affordable and true to its promise and then spread the message by word of mouth. You can advertise flashy features on prime time television and get Oscar nominees to endorse it but once people find out the product does not live up to its name they will stop buying from you. They will develop a mistrust for anything your company says after that. If you have a monopoly in the market, it will only take one tiny rival with a superior product to topple you off your high chair. Most people who have been cheated are just waiting for such a player to come up. Make your product good, reliable, affordable and make the advertising friendly and you have a solid base to sell your product. Once enough people buy it and start showing their friends, the product will sell itself. This is one of the most effective ways of selling a product and in fact the only way that I see working for me. I'm no sales guru or marketing whiz but the day I become one, I'll be sure to come back here and say 'I told you so' :)

Tweet Tweet! whos there?

Twitter is one of the things that never caught on for me. My friends and colleagues rave about it. Most of my old college mates send out enough tweets a month to fill up the stratosphere twice. For me, it is just another one of those "things that I'll learn someday as soon as I get the time". Oddly enough, much of that "time" of mine is taken by Youtube and Unreal Tournament so I usually don't have much left over for learning how to use this tiny marvel. And i never learned it because I just did not see why hundreds of people would like to know that i am stuck at the airport or that my doctor told me i had pneumonia. Most of my friends wouldn't care if a vampire from Dracula's garden drew a stake through my leg. The chance of them giving a damn about a honeybee biting me is about as remote as a penguin at the north pole.

Now before all you tweeters start pelting virtual stones at me (yes i think facebook will add that option soon, after all the virtual farmland and office space is taken up) let me be the first to state that twitter is one amazing piece of software. In a world where hundreds of new social networking sites are opening up everyday in every college dorm from Istanbul to Antarctica, twitter was the one that actually offered something very different and interesting. Ever heard of micro-finance, the concept that took the savings and loan industry by storm? This revolutionary technique is growing rapidly today and is an area of immense interest to many of the financial elite. Twitter took the social networking craze and applied the 'micro' factor to it. This is an oversimplification but it conveys the general idea. A lot of busy people who did not have time for blogs could now send out tweets. This is not to imply that those of us who do have time for blogs are colossal nerds and couch potatoes. We just sleep less at night :) Coming back, tweeting only takes seconds and you needn't spend hours thinking about what to write. No proofreading (unless your English skills are about as good as a blue whale's). Just speak your mind. This concept allowed millions of people to get online and get an identity. Twitter tapped a previously untapped market - people looking for an outlet but who didn't have time for blogs or podcasts. Instead of taking a lot of words from a few, it takes a few from a lot of people and now it has millions of users (hold on, is it billions now? After all, its been 10 minutes since i started writing this..)

It is interesting to note how a small idea can snowball into a worldwide revolution. Did all worldwide revolutions spring from small but obvious ideas? What about the steam engine, the single machine that was responsible for starting more than 2 centuries of industrial development? Or the transistor, that will be responsible for 2 or more centuries of an information age? What is the next small idea that will lead the world on another revolution? Will it come after the world ends on 21st Dec 2012 as most controversy theorists and self-proclaimed prophets would love to believe? Well we'll find out on 22nd of that month (at least those of us who wont go into caves by then). Until then, i guess its time for me to join the bandwagon. Its time to start learning how to tweet. I'll catch up with Earth soon.