Slangbusters Branding Studio | Microenterprise Branding Service

Investing in culture is a brand strategy FTW.   If you are looking for building company culture inside the boundaries of the corporate setting, t he keyword gods have defied you and this is where you should stop reading and probably close the tab. If you are looking for some insight about incorporating culture into your brand, read on. For starters, company culture inside the headquarters or any place with employees working for the brand is also important for the cultural implications outside. If you are an ice-cream brand that has tapped into the culture of a family enjoying ice-cream after dinner, you cannot be a company that forces their employees to work overtime and refrain them from the happiness of sharing the ice-cream with their families. These brands would suffer in how they are perceived by the consumer, no matter how aggressive the marketing is. (Culture > Propaganda) Branding is not what it was a  decade  ago. Earlier, companies would introspect and identi...

  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...

  Heard about water-cooler jokes?  Back then in offices there used to be one watercooler on each floor and folks came to drink water (if we go by the obvious logic). But that was just an excuse. Exactly like kids in Indian schools go to sharpen their pencils near the dustbin just to spend some time with their friends.  The water-cooler was more like a gossip joint for colleagues to exchange juicy talks or to crib about unapproved leaves. Back then, huh! This still happens. Only now water coolers are replaced by vending machines. It took me quite a while to understand how different graphic design is from web designing. And how do you expect people to know the difference? The graphic design originated in the early bit of the nineties. Web design came a decade later. Only when the internet made it to the people. Just like my mother who thinks that because it is a multicuisine restaurant, they are supposed to serve everything excellent; most people think that any designer can...

When you say "It's like…", "If you put it that way…" or "Think of it like this" you are using analogies to communicate better. Let's start this piece with a Vox documentary titled "some hospitals let a preventable infection kill their patients" No seriously, watch it.   It might not seem relevant to this piece yet, it will give further insight into how analogies can make it easier to understand the most complex of ideas. So you have watched this documentary (yay!) You noticed how they compared the approach towards the plane and car accidents with the approach that hospital officials have with patient deaths. With this analogy, they coined both the types of approach that hospitals take as plane crash hospitals and car crash hospitals. The argument that car crash hospitals make (see, I'm already using the analogy) is that it is a business and doctors are humans who make mistakes like everyone else, just the stake ...

The kickass inspiration to write this piece I still remember that evening when I had found an injured puppy in our backyard. It was whimpering in pain. I sheltered it, medicated it and very soon it became my pet pup. A few days later, over the family dinner I told my parents that when I grew up, I would take up Zoology as my subject of study. My elder brother who was then pursuing his doctorate in Economics said mockingly, ‘And then what, are you going to open a zoo?’ While I still remember his tart comment, I let it slip from my mind as the years passed by. One fine day, my pet pup disappeared all of a sudden and my fixation on Zoology went down the dumps. Rather, I saw my life revolving around entertaining advertisements, tons of good and bad copy, long, gruesome hours of pitch presentations and gut-wrenching, heart-rending arguments between myself and account holders, art directors and CBOs. Then again, a very simple question would sometimes pop up, as people outsid...