I witnessed the chopper flying over the (maxi)Mumbai city with a HUGE (I really mean it kind of huge) banner of the Volkswagen (pronounced Folks Wagon) Beetle. Cute car! Meant to be a small car! Big pricing! And a BIG banner! It was a pleasant surprise when a few colleagues yelled out to me just to show this banner carrying chopper!

I took some pictures and also tweeted about it. Here’s proof:

Tweets on VW Beetle

Since the above is a print screen image, you can access the pictures I took from here. I wanted to write about it the same day and become the ‘first person’ to break this news to the blogosphere, but work kept me away. What could have been a coup of sorts for this very rare occurance in India, was broken by traditional online magazines. Read here.

Though this may be a small event, I believe that there are some lessons from this incident:

1. Waiting for the right moment most of the times don’t work. I have experienced this many times with clients belaboring for the ‘best’ output, while the competition is having a field day killing the very ideas that we had carefully hidden till then!
2. This is a slightly controversial lesson. But lesson none-the-less. “Quality is a mind thing“. What we believe is sub-standard quality may be good enough for the receiver of the communication. Just take any of the family planning communication by the Government for instance. The quality of the production is actually abysmal. But the target audience would certainly be able to relate to it. No point in adding jazz when the user is not expecting it!
3. Quick decision making: Many times we may not have all the inputs that are required to take a decision. But as professionals, it is important to exercise our judgement and ensure quick decision and availability in the market. This is a problem which many PSUs and large process-oriented organisations suffer from. HLL vs P&G is a classic example. However, that would require a separate post for itself.
4. Once a decision is taken, it is important to stick to it. I could have posted the article and reached the market using Twitter, Facebook and other such social media. But I didn’t. Well, the blog post has now taken a differnt angle and is not a coup anymore

Some of these may sound very generic, but I believe that these are lessons which are very relevant for most Marketing Professionals. And these are skills that are not available in many Marketing Professionals too.

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