Slangbusters Branding Studio | Microenterprise Branding Service

  Because size does not matter. (A still from ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’) I have a baker friend. She runs a cloud kitchen, a fancy word used for culinary businesses that are run from home, without a professional setup of a bakery, a restaurant or a cafe. Social media and food delivery apps have given way to many such small-scale businesses to run from homes and small kitchens. My friend single-handedly manages taking orders, production, delivery, and accounting of her baking business. She recently created an Instagram account for her bakery to reach an audience and to share images of her beautiful cakes and jars that she sells to local residents of her city. When I happened to go through her IG stories, I saw she was using ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ when she was taking orders, sharing reviews, etc. One of her stories read: “Now launching, new flavors in cupcakes: DM us, we will be happy to customize your order for any event.” We.  She delivers quality pastry, has a culinary arts diplo...

Are we on the same page? Here goes something.  Once, I ordered food at home really early in the morning, at around 4 AM. I did not want anyone else in the house to be disturbed, or the delivery guy bothering joggers and people who got up that early. I’m sure they would not like someone asking for directions first thing in the morning. What I did was that I kept a track of his location on the app and waited outside, by the gate just a minute before his arrival. Somehow, this made him so happy, he delivered my food with the biggest smile I have seen at 4:30 AM in the morning. He told me, “Customers like you, make it a tad bit easier than it is. Thank you for coming down without me having to call. I did not have to ask people for directions and now, I can get on to the next delivery without wasting time.” I’m sure he must have had a bad day with a customer who must have ordered and gone to sleep. All I did was the bare minimum of being there before his arrival. This instance says...

  We might as well add ‘stories’ to the list of Maslow’s basic human needs. Instances are stories,  mythology has stories, case studies are stories, jokes are stories, brands are the epitome of stories. Why not call good design a story? Not enough emphasis can be put on the importance of stories in human experience. In recent years, storytelling has gained its deserved attention. People from various fields of expertise have started calling themselves storytellers and it is high time, even designers explore the art. No, I am not talking about creating new ways of identifying the same role, which pretentious professionals do, like a writer calling themselves a designer of words. The objective of this piece is to urge designers to explore storytelling to help their talent evolve. What is designing? (Artwork by  Savan Prajapati on Instagram ) Just like experience, design is also innate to us humans. This is why all of us have our own definition of design. All of us design eve...

  Let’s face it. We all are a cocktail of biases. In the world of business, there is no room for some. As I write this,    at a local Starbucks, I have a corporate meeting going on at the next table. Two men in suits, sipping their mocha lattes are discussing and I couldn’t help but eavesdrop. The meeting seemed to have gone successful, indicated by the firm handshake before they left. Only that I did not understand a word of what they were talking about, apart from something about quarterly goals. I heard words like disruption and outbound strategies. It seemed like they were from an advertising conglomerate. They used the word branding so many times out of context, I almost wanted to intervene. Although, why did I fail to understand what the meeting was about? Why did it seem successful, even with the use of heavy jargon? Before we talk about complexity bias, I would definitely acknowledge that I am not a marketing executive or an owner of any marketing jargon dictionar...