Brand slaves!
Is there a generation of brand slaves out there? that too with millions of $ and Rupees being manipulated by the industry?
Every industry has its ‘brands’ and if you dig deep you find the nonsense that they do.
McDonalds: they are happy to stuff your face with food that is not just terrible but has long term health implications too. Even in a mature market like USA with so much of legal activism they sell junk, what damage they can do in a country like India – I will leave it to YOUR imagination.
Adidas: I bought a range of sandals – Rs. 375 in a friendly neighborhood shop to a Rs. 1800 one in Adidas. With more or less similar kind of usage I found that the Rs. 800 sandals bought in Bata was far superior to the Adidas one. In fact on a per day basis, the unbranded cheapest one did not fare too badly vis a vis the branded ones.
Telephone services: do brands matter? all of us have suffered at the hands of all the brands, right?
Food: nothing to say that a big huge brand does better than a small local friendly neighborhood hotel.
Professional services: the big 4 accounting firms regularly pay fines and do out of court settlements, do they not? Deloitte is about the fined a real huge amount in UK – this is after New York levied on them a big fine – read the Deloitte story, you will find it on Google.
J P Morgan – you MUST, MUST, MUST read this story, NOW.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20130724,0,2146388.column
Krish
Let me share an interesting experience. Recently I had been to Ooty and every shop over there are selling what they call it homemade chocolates. If you enquire, everyone was saying these are chemical free chocs made at home and better than cadbury and other international brands. These chocolates do not have any wrap and needless to say there is no mention of mfg date or exp date. Worse, the chocs are handled with bare hands and scoups in open. Ofcourse lot of people are buying them with the sales talk. What can we say if these people comes back and say that home made chocs at Ooty tastes better than international brands.
I believe we should learn from international brands and try to develop our own to compete and beat them. Blind criticism of all Western based brands would only hurt us badly.
Suresh
A brand is 10% quality assurance and 90% lifestyle sustenance – for the brand owner !!
Pravin
@Krish – we in india are susceptible to reverse brand snobbery as well. anything that is ‘natural’ or ‘ayurvedic’ is fine and has ‘zero side effects’ sounds great to us. well,even common FOOD has side effects!
then the babas and other sant peddlers have ‘rishi -prokt’ blessed by rishi stuff to peddle.and we are suckers for it.